SPECIAL REPORT DEEP SEA GOLD RUSH
Quest to harvest riches from the abyss
WEEKLY July 2-8, 2011
Vision as you've never seen it before
PERSONAL 'COPTERS CONFESSIONS OF A METEORITE HUNTER
No2819
US$5.95 CAN$5.95
>
WHITE DWARF WORLDS Life around the death stars
Instant expert Intelligence Our complete guide to brainpower - and how to boost it
Science and technology news
www.newscientist.com US jobs in science
I like value for money, and the freedom to change my flight. Free nuts I can do easyJet Flexi - the new business unlimited free date changes in period. Includes 1 piece of hold, 1 hand luggageand Speedy
u,......-'.
Times change The easyJet Flexi Fare is paid in full at the time of booking. Any additional services must be paid for in full, at the time of booking. No refund applies if passengers are unableto fly. Date changes and Speedy Board ing subject to availability. Datechanges must be made at least two hours before original departure time. For full Terms & Conditions see ou r Carrier's Regulations on easyJet.com
CONTENTS
Volume 211 No 2819 This issue on line
newscientist.com/issue/2819
News
News
UPFRONT Advertising to monkeys. Is asteroid the solar system's lost world? 6 THIS WEEK Murky lenses to sharpen images. Why Tasmanian devils are sit ting ducks. Unlocking the tick-tock of a nuclear clock. Faulty DNA zip may stress your children. Good at visual illusions, bad at introspection 16 IN BRIEF "Broken" toys show infants' rationality. Evidence that bird tweets use grammar. Monkeys stressed by ecotourism. Vital statistics of a famous black hole 4
:;:
6 The deep sea gold rush
~
"'z 0
"' 0 u 0
"'"'uJ: w
~
u z
5u J:
Quest to harvest riches from the abyss
).>( <( w
"',_ "'z w w
>:
z
0
"'5z w _, -<
"'~ ;:)
z
"'::>
Technology 19 Personal 'copter commuting. Brain controls smart home. Robo-paparazzi. App prediction
On the cover
32 Your seventh sense Vision as you've never seen it before
Deep sea gold rush Quest to harvest riches f rom the abyss 19 Personal helicopters How to cope with freedom in three dimensions 28 Confessions of a meteorite hunter 37 White dwarf worlds Life around the death stars
Your seventh sense Vi...-...,.,.............. -...
24 The extraordinary efforts to clean up
after the Japanese quake and tsunami
Opinion 26 Network power There is an alternative to
..----....... ......... Uir!lft
.,
~
-·~
Cover image
Aperture
6
h"tunt '' l"'rl lnlclllg•~~
tV ....
....... f
till•
•Ill hi
"cultural junk food", says Peter Lunenfeld 27 One minute with ... Shuzhuo Li, the man who's trying to reverse China's gender bias 28 Meteorite hell A passion for hot rocks got Michael Farmer locked up... in Oman 30 LETTERS DIY science. Pyramid power
~ j;,
FlatlinerVZ/Debut Art
Features 32 Your seventh sense (see above left) 37 White dwarf worlds Life around the death stars 40 Claws for thought (see left)
Features
40
Instant expert
Claws for thought
Intelligence Your complete pull-out guide to brainpower- and how to boost it
Can a crow think? How about a fruit f ly?
Culturelab 44 Damon Albarn meets Or Dee Gorillaz star
turns the 16th-century occultist into opera 45 Thrilling stats Bayes's theorem gets gripping 46 Short reviews Antarctic pioneers. Enigma of epigenetics. Hysterical histories
Regulars
VINCEIH J. MUSII NATIONAL GEORAPHICSTOCK
3
Coming next week... (! Information Reed Business
Summer on Titan Saturn's fabulous moon is eerily like home
30 56 57 48
EDITORIAL An opportunity to show how mining should be done ENIGMA FEEDBACK Mars rock competition results THE LAST WORD Hot topic JOBS & CAREERS
Forgotten Eden lt may prove more important than the Amazon Zjuly 20111NewScientist 11
J? .,
-----~· ·
-
> PERFECTLY FORMED The incredibly light, fast and strong R-Series from Toshiba Every component that goes into the new R8 range of laptops is conceived, designed and crafted with exceptional attention to detail. lt all comes together in an outstanding combination of speed, strength and mobility. In fact, the only thing you'll find missing is compromise. Available in a choice of screen sizes, the perfectly formed A-Series is available now. Take a closer look at www.toshiba.eo.uk/r-serles
TOSHIBA Leading Innovation _~> Toshlbo Is a trademllr1
"'"'*reepecliw
EDITORIAL NewScientist LOCATIONS
USA 225 Wyman Street. Wal1ham, MA 02451 Tel +17817348770 Fax +1720 3569217 201 Mission Street, 26th Floor. San Francisco, CA 94105 Tei+141S9083348 Fax +1415 704 3125
UK Lacon House, 84 Theobald's Road, London WC1X 8NS Tel +44(0)2076111200 Fax +44 (0) 20 76111250 Australia Tower 2, 475 Victoria Avenue, Chatswood, NSW2067 Tel +61 29422 2666 Fax +6129422 2633 TO SUBSCRIBE Tel888 822 3242
[email protected]
An annual subscription in 1he USA is $154-including delivery. An annual subscription in canada is CAN$182 including delivery. canadian subsoiptions distnbuted byRCS lntemational, 121821lelden Ct livonia.Ml48150 CONTACTS Editorial & media enquiries Tel 7817348770
[email protected]
Enquiries Tel +44 (0) 20 76111202
[email protected] Who's who newscientist.comfpeople Contact us newscientistcom/contact
Mine, or ours? Hydrothermal vent mining offers a unique opportunity THE American politician Stewart True, in the current economic Udall once wrote that mining "is climate, few vent fields are likely like a search-and-destroy mission". to contain enough minerals to The next frontier of mining attract widespread commercial hydrothermal vents on the interest. But if the prices of copper ocean floor - provides a unique and gold soar- and especially if opportunity to change that rare earth elements, needed for high-tech manufacturing, are perception. Metal ores have formed around some of these found in quantity- all bets are off. Now is the time to put in place submarine geysers, and the first mining operations are scheduled to begin offPapua New Guinea "If gold prices soar, or before the end of 2013 (see page 6). rare earth elements are The company involved, Nautilus found at hydrothermal Minerals of Vancouver, Canada, vents, all bets are off" has taken significant steps to minimise its environmental legal frameworks to ensure impact. Vents are also naturally that any rush for minerals will disturbed habitats whose avoid the destructive effects of residents may have the capacity California's gold rush in the 19th to bounce back from mining. century. The International Sea bed Still, it would be a mistake Authority, which regulates mining to relax. Vents merit special claims in international waters, protection, for one thing because must adopt clear guidelines on they host remarkable ecosystems. conserving vent ecosystems. This
could pressure prospectors to concentrate on inactive sites, which have no vent fauna. Most importantly, the developed world needs to help the poor nations of the western Pacific, whose waters host some of the richest vent deposits, build their expertise in marine environmental regulation. Encouragingly, the European Union has already stepped up with a €7-7-million grant to SOPAC, the geoscience division of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, for this purpose. Finally, the scientists who study vents must be above reproach. Unfortunately, research has sometimes damaged populations of vent animals. As well as keeping a watchful eye on prospectors, scientists also need to abide by the highest standards of environmental protection. •
Better the devil you know...
It still doesn't. There were good
Display Advertising Tel7817348770
[email protected] Reauitment Advertising Tel7817348770
[email protected] Permissions for reuse
[email protected] Marketing Tel7817348778 marl<
[email protected] Newsstand Distributed by Time/Wamer Retail Sales and Marl<eting. 260 Cherry Hill Road, Parsippany, N) 07054 Tel212 5221212 Syndication Tribune Media Services International Tel2132377987 email
[email protected] © 2011 Reed Business Information ltd, England.
New Scientist ISSN0262 4079 is publ5hed weekly except for the last weel< in December by Reed Business Information Ltd. England. Reed Business lnfonnation, CJo Schnell Pubrr.;hing CD. Inc., 360 Park Avenue South, 12th Roar.New York, NY 10010. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and other mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes toNewScienus~ POBax3806. Chesterfield.M063006-9953. USA RegisteredatthePostOfficeasa newspaper and printed in USA by FJY Communications Inc. Mechanicsburg. PA17055
ONLY 15 years ago, the future of the best known carnivorous marsupial looked secure. Tasmanian devils then numbered 100,000 and had a large island to call home, so the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classed them as being of "Least Concern". In fact the devils were sitting on a genetic time bomb, and in 1996
it went off, in the form of a deadly infectious cancer that has pushed them to the brink of extinction. They cannot fight it, because genetically speaking all the individuals are almost identical (see page 10). The IUCN had no idea, since it did not demand the sort of genetic testing that would have revealed how vulnerable the devils were.
reasons for that back in the 1990s. Genome sequencing was slow, difficult and expensive, and even when the data was in no one knew what it meant. But times have changed. The cost of genotyping is falling and we now have a better idea of how genes work. Genotyping thousands of species will still be expensive, but it could help to prevent another tragedy like the one unfolding in Tasmania. •
Now you can find extrasolar worlds
them accordingly. Comet HaleSo pp is a famous example. Supernovas and meteors are important targets too. Now amateurs have a new goal. On page 37, we describe how backyard telescopes can join the hunt for Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of stars. They may even detect the first. This raises a
key question: what to call it? So far, more than 560 confirmed extrasolar planets have been designated a catalogue number based on the relevant survey or mission. Witness Kepler-10 or Corot-14. With potentially thousands of finds by amateurs on the way, the door is open for planet Sean or planet Ellie. •
BACKYARD astronomers have a fine track record when it comes to discovering heavenly bodies. Of the 200 or so new comets found every year, amateurs spot a handful of them first, and name
Zjuly 20111 NewScientist 13
UPFRONT
Billboards target monkeys SUBTLE it ain't . The first advertising campaign ever to be aimed at
by two billboard s that will hang outside the monkeys' enclosure.
non-human consumers, unve iled at the ad industry's cannes Lions
"The foods will be novel to them and are equally delicious;' says Olwell. Designing the campaign threw up
Festival on 25 June, will use blatant sex to persuade its audience. The unsuspecting consumers
some special challenges. Capuchins "do not have language or culture and
are a colony of capuchin monkeys, who will later be invited to choose between two competing brands
have very short attention spans", says Olwell. "We had to get to the absolute core of what is advertising."
of food. Keith Olwell and Elizabeth Kiehner of New York ad age ncy Proton created the campaign with
New Scientist has seen the two billboards. We cannot show them until the study is over, but can reveal that
primatologist Laurie Santos of Yale University. Captive capuchins understand
one shows a graphic shot of a f emale monkey's genitals alongside brand P\s logo. The other shows the alpha male
money and behave in similar ways to humans in economic games.
of the colony, also with brand A. The campaign should kick off in the coming weeks. Watch this space
So the team wondered if they would respond to advertising too. They are creating two food brands, one backed
for updates on this venture into monkey consumerism. Consumer instincts
Quake homes lost
to repeated liquefact ion. Once liquefied sediment settles it OVER 5000 hom es damaged can sink, increasing the risk offlooding, he says. The worst by the earthquakes that hit affected areas of the city h ave Christchurch will not b e rebuilt at present, the New Zealand sunk by 1 metre. Quigley says government announced last week. the land could be rebuilt on, but The magnitude 7.0 and it would be expensive and take 6.3 quakes that shook the city in m any years. Land that holds critical September 2010 and February t his year caused extensive structural infrastru cture, like t ransport damage. Crucially, the quakes systems, is being reused by weakened the soil beneath large pushing concrete piles with metal areas of the city th rough a process reinforcements through the liquefied layer and into the bedrock called liquefaction, whereby pressure from shaking ground to create solid foundations. transforms wet but solid san d into Thomas Wilson of th e University unstable slurry. The government of Canterbury says the liquefied h as publish ed a m ap outlining layer is 10 metres thick in some areas wh ere the damage is too areas, m aking it "economically severe to rebuild in the near-term. challenging" to reinforce the Mark Quigley, a seismologist entire city. Both Quigley and Wilson believe the decision not "The worst affected areas to rebuild some of their city is of Christchurch have sunk sensible. "It's an opportunity to increase the resiliency of by 1 metre, increasing the risk of flooding" Christchurch," Wilson says. Geosciences New Zealand, a at the University of Canterbury government project, predicts that in Christchurch, who lives in there is a one-in-four chance that a quake greater than 6 .0 will h it an affected house, says that continu ing seismic activity means the area around Christchurch in many properties are vulnerable the coming year. 4 1NewScientist I 2 July 2011
Radioactive urine FUKUSHIMA'S legacy is still unfolding. Radioactive elements have been found in the urin e of 15 people in Iitate and Kawamat a, 35 to 40 kilometres away from the stricken Japanese nuclear plant. These are th e first results from a planned 30-year project to m onitor the 2 million resident s of Fukushima prefecture for signs of radiation exposure. Nanao Kamada of Hiroshima University and colleagues found iodine-131 at doses of up to 3.2 millisieverts in
six people in the first round of test s in early May, but non e in late May, and radioactive caesium in all 15 in both rounds. This brings the dose in the two months following the disaster to between 4.9 and 14.2 millisieverts.The "safe" annual dose is 20 m illisieverts. Rich ard Wakeford of the Dalton Institute in Manchester, UK, says the levels sh ould not pose too much of a hazard provided they fall in coming months. But he expressed surprise that iodine-131, with a half-life of eight days, was found in urine as late as May.
Mars landing sites down to two TALK about a tough road to climb. On
Gale crater (pictured), which hosts
24 June, mission scientists endorsed two landing sites for NASP\s next
a 5 -kilometre-high mound and is thought to have once been filled with
Mars rover from a shortlist of four. One of the two would see Curiosity ascend a mound nearly as high as
water. Because the oldest rocks are atthe mound's base, as it ascends the rover would t rack how the
mount Kilimanjaro. Where to land the $2.5 billion robot, due to blast off in November, has been
planet's chemistry- and potential habitability - changed over time. The other pick is another former
debated for years. NASA will mull over the recommendations but is not obliged to follow either of them.
crater lake, Eberswalde.lt is further from the equator and therefore colder, so the rover would require
One pick is the 150-kilometre-wide
more heating to function there.
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
GO SECONDS
Protoplanet probe
Outforthe panda count By collecting panda droppings, a team
NEVER have old leftovers made so many scientists salivate. After a four year journey, NASA's Dawn spacecraft is nearing the giant asteroid Vesta, a relic of planet
of70 trackers hopes to discover how many of the animals still live in the wild in China, as part of the country's fourth decadal census of panda numbers. The trackers began their work on Sunday, reports Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, adding that 1596 wild pandas were recorded last time.
" Vesta finished growing long before Earth so might preserve clues to the era of early planet formation" building that could hold clues to how Earth formed. "Vesta is a window into the early origins of our solar system," says Carol Raymond ofNASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Shale or returns At 530 kilometres across, Vest a TRAPPED gas could prove is one of the biggest denizens of the asteroid belt, the junkyard of problematic for the energy leftover planetary building blocks industry. Despite the money found between Mars and Jupiter. being poured into efforts to extract natural gas from shale, The pictures snapped by the economic benefits are unclear. Dawn since mid-May are blurry, Studies into shale gas extraction showing only tantalising hints of craters. But as the craft slips into are typically supported by industry bodies. Because their reports are orbit around Vesta in mid-July, not peer-reviewed, economist its topography and chemical Thomas Kinnaman ofBucknell composition should be revealed. University in Lewisburg, Scientists think Vesta finished growing long before Earth and the Pennsylvania, decided to review other planets, so might preserve " Studies into shale gas clues to what that era of early extraction are typically planet formation was like. supported by industry and After a year in orbit, Dawn will are not peer-reviewed" head to Ceres, the solar system's biggest asteroid, to help explain why Ceres, unlike Vesta, seems six of them him self. Three were written by academics at major to contain a lot of water-ice. universities, while three were ~ written by private consultants. ~ All support extracting shale gas, ~ arguing that it creates new jobs and revenue. ii' Kinnaman found that they all ~ ~ contained flaws that exaggerated ~ the benefits of shale gas extraction to local economies. Most rely on an economic model called IMPLAN, which supposes, say, that local services such as hotel rooms are going unused until the gas industry comes along to spend money on them. In fact, such spending may displace other consumers, Gale crater beckons creating no net benefit. Kinnaman
g
Salmonella slayer
Is gas from shale viable? also claims that none of the studies measured all the costs and benefits of extracting shale gas, so could not determine if it really offers a net gain (Ecological Economics, DOl: t0.10t6/j.ecolecon.20tt.02.oos). This week The New York Times published hundreds of gas industry emails, many of which claim that the amount of gas being produced is exaggerated.
Babies left on hold FEAR of getting fired has forced many couples in Europe and the US to abandon plans to have babies. The uncertain economic climate since the crash in 2008 brought to an end steady increases in birth rates that were seen in almost all European countries since around 2000, according to a report on birth rates in rich countries. Many factors influence birth rates, "but a main one is economic uncertainty", says Vegard Skirbekk of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, one of the authors of the report (Population and Development Review, DOl: 10.lllt/ j.t728·4457·
2011.00411.X). Recovery may be slow. "Even if you have an economic boom, it could take time before there's enough confidence, secure enough jobs and high enough salaries fo r fertility rates to recover," he says.
Chickens have been purged of food · poisoning bacteria by inoculating their guts with a rival predatory bacterial species which invades and kills salmonella. Called Bdellovibrio, the bacterium is safe to humans and reduced salmonella by 90 per cent in treated birds, says project leader Liz Sockett of the University of Nottingham, UK (Applied and Environmental Microbiology,
in press).
Crow mob rules Agroup of crows has learned to recognise an apparently dangerous human, and to harass that person, simply because their neighbours and parents harassed them too. Learning from each other helps the crows respond to unfamiliar threats (Proceedings of the Royal Society B,
DOl: 10.109B/rspb.2011.0957).
Los Alamos fire The US military's centre for nuclear research, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was threatened by a major wildfi re as New Scientist went to press. Aspokesman said radioactive materials at the site are stored in partially buried vaults made of hardened concrete and steel, protecting them from fire damage.
Asteroid skims Earth An asteroid between Band 19 metres across buzzed Earth - at a distance of about 12,000 kilometres- on 27 June. Named 2011 MD, it posed no danger but was at least double the size of asteroids previously seen so close.
Zjuly 20111 NewScientist I 5
SPECIAL REPORT I MINING THE SEABED
6 1NewScientist IZJuly 2011
In this section • Unlocking the tick-tock of a nuclear clock, page 12 • Faulty zip may stress your children, page 14 • Brain controls smart home, page 20
SOME 1600 metres below the waves, a 150-tonne tank-like vehicle wields a robotic arm armed with rotating rock cutters. After it has ground down the volcanic chimneys that rise from the sea floor, other mining robots follow in its tracks. One chews up the levelled seabed, composed of ores of copper and gold; another acts like a giant vacuum cleaner, gathering the finely ground rubble so that it can be pumped to a ship at the surface. If all goes to plan, this is the scene that will play out in late 2013 at a site called Solwara 1, off the coast of Papua New Guinea (see map, page g). According to Nautilus Minerals of Vancouver, Canada, the company behind the scheme, the rich mineral deposits that form at marine hydrothermal vents - volcanic systems that spew scalding sulphurous water into the ocean - are the next frontier of mining. As well as exploiting other sites in Papua New Guinea's waters, the company intends to mine vents off Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu and New Zealand.
The industry, if it takes off, is unlikely to be restricted to national exclusive economic zones - the regions that st retch up to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) seaward of each country's coast, over which it has rights to use the marine resources. Some of the biggest known hydrothermal vent fields, which cluster along tectonic plate boundaries, lie in international waters, and exploiting these fields is legally complicated. Next week, the Legal and Technical Commission of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), based in Kingston, Jamaica, will review applicat ions from China and Russia for 15-year exploration contracts to begin prospecting at sites on the Southwest Indian ridge and the Mid-Atlantic ridge, respectively. The age of mining at hydrothermal vents, it seems, is dawning. Vent fields are attractive for mining because they contain high-grade metal ores. Deposits at Solwara 1, for instance, are thought to contain 6.8 per cent by weight of copper, compared with >
Vent mining The Solwara 1 hydrothermal vent field will be mined over an area of around 0.1 km 2, in which confirmed ore deposits are up to 18 metres thi ck
AUXILIARY CUTTER Levels rough terrain to create benches - smooth platforms with gent le sl opes on which the other machines can work
- 1600m
TO SHIP
SUBS EA LIFT PUMP Receives material f rom the gathering machine and pumps it to the production support vessel on the ocean surface
•
BULK CUTTER Does most of t he mining work. Grinds up t he sea floor to a depth of 1 metre with each pass
GATHERING MACHINE Follows in the tracks of t he bulk cutter, draw ing up cut material for transport t o the surface
2 July 20111 NewScientist 17
SPECIAL REPORT I MINING THE SEABED about o .6 per cent typically found at mines on land. The deposits form when water that has percolated through rock beneath the sea floor, dissolving sulphur and metals, is ejected at temperatures of up to 350 •c into the frigid deep ocean. Black metal sulphides precipitate out, forming vent chimneys. As chimneys topple and reform, vent fields can develop into mounds of m etal-rich ore. The prospect of mining these deposits alarms many scientists who study vents and t heir creatures. A variety of worms, molluscs and crustaceans inhabit the vents - including such oddities as 2-metre-long giant tube worms (Riftia pachyptila) and the yeti crab (Kiwa hirsuta), named for its "hairy" legs and claws. What m akes these ecosystems remarkable is that the entire food web depends on microbes that get their energy by oxidising hydrogen sulphide emitted from the vents - some of which live as symbionts inside larger organisms. This chemosynthesis is fundamentally
different from the photosynthesis that sustains most life on Earth. Since the first vents were seen in 1977, new animal species have been found at a rate of about one per month, with no sign of discovery rates falling off. Given that vent ecology is still poorly understood, some researchers argue that it is too early to begin comm ercial exploitat ion. "We have really just scratched the surface of what lives in these areas," says Maurice
Tube worms such as Tevnia
jerichonana thrive in the hot water of hydrothermal vents
VENT SCIENTISTS CLEAN UP THEIR ACT There's an irony to calls from marine researchers to restrict mining at hydrothermal vents: until now, the
powerful lights of submersibles that explored the vent fields (Nature, DOl: 10.1038/18142).
But the statement lacks the teeth of an earlier draft code of conduct, put forward by Lyle
greatestthreat to these natural wonders has been overenthusiastic scientific research.
Fortunately, subsequent monitoring indicates that shrimp populations are doing fine, says
Glowka, a consultant who today is a legal adviser to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, and marine
The alarm was sounded in 1990 by Verena Tunnicliffe at
jon Copley of the University of Southampton, UK. But it was
ecologist Kim juniper of the University of Victoria. This would
the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. She studied vent sites on the juan de Fuca ridge in the north-east Pacific that
another reminder that scientists needed to put their house in order. 'The lastthing we want to do is damage them by studying them,"
have asked national research agencies to make funding conditional on abiding by the code. "lt fell flat on its face;· says Glowka.
had been visited by scientists at least three times in the 1980s. Populations of Ridgeia piscesae
Copley says. Copley is eo-chair of lnterRidge, the international body set up to
"I think it was seen as a threat." How closely scientists abide by
tube worms had plummeted at chimneys where sampling had
coordinate vent science, which in 2006 adopted a statement on
the lnterRidge statement is unclear. Earlier this year, Cindy Lee Van Dover of Duke University in North
taken place, but remained healthy at unsampled sites uournal of Geophysical Research, DOl:
responsible research.lt calls on scientists to avoid any activities that will undermine the
Carolina published a survey in which 90 per cent of researchers who responded said they followed the
10.1029/jB095iBOBp12961). In some cases, even looking at vent animals can hurt them.ln
sustainability of vent organism populations, refrain from all but essential collections and avoid
recommendations. However, half doubted whether their colleagues did- and only 5 per cent of more
1999, UK researchers found that the shrimp that congregate around vents on the Mid-Atlantic ridge had
transplanting material or creatures between sites. lt also asks researchers to share samples and
than 3000 scientists who were sent the questionnaire replied (Conservation Biology, DOl: 10.
apparently been blinded by the
information to avoid duplication.
llll/j.1523-1739.2010.01642.x).
8 I NewScientist I2July 2011
Tivey, a vent scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "You have the potential of wiping out a community that you don't yet know exists." That won't happen at Solwara 1, Nautilus officials insist. "The environmental impacts are going to be well managed," says Joe Dowling, the company's vice-president for communications. Indeed, Nautilus asserts that its activities at the relatively small Solwara 1, which spans just over 0.1 square kilometres - about the size of 10 football pitches - will be much less environmentally damaging than conventional mining, which typically occurs on a much larger scale. Solwara 1 is a relatively quiet vent field that includes dormant chimneys and none of the gushing "black smokers" seen at the most spectacular vents. Still, chimneys venting hot water host vibrant populations of animals including lfremeria nautilei snails andEochionelasmus ohtai barnacles, which will be destroyed by mining. Nautilus is establishing a reserve site some 2.5 kilometres away, from which larvae should recolonise the mined area once operations cease, after 30 months or so. To minimise damage from mining spoil, particles larger than 8 micrometres across will be removed by the processing ship, before waste water is returned to the ocean, about so metres above the seabed. As part of its evaluation, Nautilus commissioned independent scientists to survey both sites. They concluded that the reserve site was well chosen. "It is more diverse [than the area to be mined]," says marine ecologist Bob Kennedy of the National University oflreland in Galway, a member of the team. "Mining may be an acceptable disturbance in the context of the natural variability and disturbed nature of these vent fields." Samantha Smith, Nautilus's environmental manager, says the company will survey for recolonisation for at least three years after mining ceases and will monitor the effects of the fine sediment likely to fall on the sea bed from the returning waste water. Vent biologists contacted by New Scientist are generally impressed with Nautilus's environm ental impact
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
statement, but remain wary about the future if mining expands. ''I'm concerned, and I'm paying attention," says Charles Fisher of Pennsylvania State University in University Park. In March, the international body that coordinates vent science, InterRidge, sent the ISA a list of vent fields that it suggested should be considered for protection from prospecting. This included almost half of the 72 known active vent fields in international waters, and was based on a poll of vent scientists, some of whom wanted to protect all active sites. These are easier to find because oftheir"smoky" plumes. Earlier this year, Cindy Lee Van Dover of Duke University's Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, North Carolina, who also worked on the site assessment for Nautilus, argued in Nature that mining and prospecting should be put on hold until firm guidelines for the conservation of vent ecosystems are in place (DOl: 10.1038/470031a). That's unlikely to happen, but Adam Cook, a marine scientist with the ISA, says that the authority's legal and technical experts will issue environmental guidelines at a later date. He also points out that the prospecting that will be allowed under the ISA's exploration contracts is similar to the sampling already performed by vent researchers (see "Vent scientists clean up their act"). By the time mining takes off, if it does, guidelines should be in place. For the foreseeable future, simple economics provides some reassurance t hat vents will not be trashed en masse. Perhaps 1 per cent of vent fields contain commercially viable mineral deposits, estimates Mark Hannington, an economic geologist at the University of Ottawa in Canada. But if prices of copper and gold rise, the incentives will shift. The fear is that without strong oversight, subsequent environmental assessments may not be as rigorous as that conducted for Solwara 1. Vent fields differ radically in the species present and possibly the extent to which the animals at a particular site embody unique genetic diversity. "Every one of these developments needs an appropriate assessment," says Kennedy. "We shouldn't allow a Wild West freefor-all after one or two studies." •
Distribution of hydrothermal vent fields The Solwara 1 site is located in Papua New Guinea's exclusive economic zone and is the first vent field likely t o be mined for mineral-rich deposits. China and Russia have applied for 15-year exploration contracts to begin prospecting at sites on the Southwest Indian ridge and the Mid-Atlantic ridge
•"of.
.. ...-,_--".........
~- ·.
•
-.
,.. ••
••
~
~•
SOLWARAl
•• ~ I
PAPUA NEWGUINEA
~
•••
HYDROTHERMAL VENT FIELDS • Active Inactive • Unconfirmed
PLATE BOUNDARIES -··-Trench - Ri dge -..-·Transform
•
International waters Exclusive economic zones
Zjuly 2011 1NewScientist 19
THIS WEEK Review Letters, measures the
Murky lenses make sharper images MacGregor Campbell
IT'S as ifHumpty Dumpty was put back together again stronger than before. Light that passes through an opaque medium, such as an eggshell, can be reassembled in sharper detail and over a wider field of view than if it passed through a transparent lens alone. Such "scattering" lenses could one day be used to see individual living cells, replacing biopsies and improving surgical precision. In 2007, Allard Mosk and colleagues at Twente University in Enschede, the Netherlands, demonstrated that materials not normally transparent to optical wavelengths can be used to sharply focus what little light gets through. By correlating input and output light, the researchers calculated a "transmission matrix" that defines how light is scattered by disordered particles
in such a material. They used this matrix to design the shape of the incoming light waves so that they scattered off the particles and came to a focus on the other side. In 2010, the researchers showed ~ that such a lens could focus light z~ into a spot one-tenth the size of ~ that produced by an ideal g transparent lens of the same size, ~ >< making the focus to times as ~ Looking through skin sharp. In May, they imaged gold f? nanoparticles at a resolution of just 97 nanometres, to show that that puts a smile on our faces scattering lenses can image below every day", says Mosk. "But it does the 200-nanometre limit of so at a cost of being rather slow conventional optical lenses and having a very small field of (Physical Review Letters, DOl: view of only a few micrometres." Now Wonshik Choi of Korea 10.1103/PhysRevLett.I06.193905). University in Seoul and colleagues It is a painstaking process, though. To create an image with have found a way to take pictures such high resolution, they had to that are a thousand times as take "zoomed in" snapshots of wide - up to several millimetres, small regions of the nanoparticles though the resolution is lower than with Mosk's method. and then stitch these images together. The technique "achieves Their technique, detailed a sub-too-nanometre resolution in a paper to appear in Physical
transmission matrix of a potential lens faster and in more detail than previous methods. They used a 450-rnicrometrethick slice offresh rat skin as a lens. First they illuminated it from different angles, capturing around 2o,ooo images of the resulting transmitted light in 40 seconds. This provided a detailed 3D model of the skin sample's transmission matrix. Then they placed a microglial cell from a rat's brain behind the skin-lens and took another image (see top image, left). They used pattern-matching software to sort through the 2o,ooo images to determine which regions of the matrix were in front of the cell. This allowed them to piece together a detailed picture of the cell (bottom image). The technique provided a field of view five times as wide as a traditional lens. This is because rays of light reflected from the target at angles too wide to be intersected by normal lenses are bent into a detector by the scattering lens (see diagram). "Our system can perform widefield imaging by converting a
Tasmanian devils were sitting ducks for cancer
Clinging on 10 I NewScientist 12 July 2011
DESPITE its ferocious nature, the Tasmanian devil is a creature faced with extinction, t he victim of a gruesome facial tumour disease. Now the first genetic sequencing of these carnivorous marsupials has revealed that we had a hand in their decline: centuries of human interference left them st ripped of genetic diversity and vulnerable to disease. This meant that when the parasitic "devil f acial tumour disease" appeared in 1996 it rapidly spread through the entire population, causing it to plummet by over 60 per cent between 1996 and today. The disease is transmitted by physical contact, mostly biting during
sex, and is almost always fatal. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN} has now classed Tasmanian devils, Sarcophilus harrisii, as endangered, and some st udies estimate the species could be wiped out within decades. To find out why they cannot fight the cancer, Stephan Schuster of Pennsylvania State University in University Park and colleagues sequenced the genomes of two devils. He chose animals f rom opposite ends of Tasmania, which should be as genetically distinct as devils get. Yet their genomes only differed at 915,000 sites. A similar comparison showed t hat two
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
c:>-
distorted image into a clean image using the recorded transmission m atrix," says Choi. "It is very nice work," says Jochen Aulbach at the FOM Inst itute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. "It brings the concept of scattering len ses a big step closer to application for wide· area microscopy." "I know of no other compact optical system that combines
-
such high resolution with a field of view that large," says Mosk. He hopes to see a hybrid system that combines his resolution with Choi's speed and field of view. Ult imately, h e says, the technique could improve surgeons' views of what to cut during keyhole surgery. "Light scattering may seem detrimental to imaging, but in fact a scattering system can m ake an almost perfect lens." •
Scatter for sharpness An "opaque" lens can focus more sharply over a wider fi eld of view LIGHT ESCAPES LIGHT RAYS
OBJECT
TRADITIONAL LENS
CU±:! Q,U') OQj > CU.-
.t:.C:
Help push the boundaries of innovation and take your career to the next level''
~::J
Science. engineering and technology at The Open University. If you want to help shape our futu re while broadening your own career horizons, our wide ra nge of science, engineering and technology courses lead t o qualifications that wi ll get you noticed by th e people that matter. Our study method helps you devel op skills you can put into practice at work straight away, using a blend of study materials. online fo rums and even mobile media to help you fit study around work. Welcome to Britain's favourite university.
LIGHT ESCAPES
SCATTERING LENS The lens alters th e path of the light rays, so more light ends up at the detector
DETECTOR
-- -
SCATTERED LIGHT ENTERS LENS Chemistry Computing & ICT Design & Innovation
Health Sciences Life Sciences Mathematics & Statistics Physics & Astronomy Systems Thinking in Practice
humans from China and j apan
were left vulnerable to disease.
differ at 3,257,000 sites. Genetic analysis of a further 175 wild animals and seven museum
This is clearly at the root of their problems, says Katherine Belov of the University of Sydney. "Devils are
Engineering & Technology Environmental Science
specimens showed that devils have had a low genetic diversity for over
essentially immunological clones, so tumours pass between them without triggering an immune response."
Environmental & International Studies Geosciences
100 years (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 001: 10.1073/pnas.l102838108).
" Devils are immunological clones, so tumours pass between them without triggering a response" Humans had a big hand in this. Devils were wiped out in mainland Australia by dingoes brought in by settlers, then t hose that remained in Tasmania were hunted as pests, causing several population crashes. As their genetic diversity was slashed, the devils
The Australian and Tasmanian governments have set up a conservation programme, capturing disease-free devils to establish an "insurance population". Housed at sites like the Devil Ark in Somersby, New South Wales, these animals could repopu late Tasmania if the wild population is wiped out. Schuster found seven distinct populations of devils, and says individuals from each must be collected to preserve genetic diversity. Unfortunately, data on where the animals were found suggests they have not been. Michael Marsh all •
Technology Management
I I
•I I •I I •
Educational Affiliate
CISCO
...... - -,_._,
. . .,..
I
••• •
-
ahead
... www.openuniversity.eo.uk/set ... 0845 300 8846
Quote: GAMAGL
INSPIRING LEARNING The Open Universi ty is incorpora ted by Royal Charter (RC 000391). an exempt charity in England and Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (S C038302).
Zj uly 2011 1NewScientist 111
THIS WEEK
One step closer to a nuclear timekeeper different. Instead of relying on light waves emitted by elect rons, WHY would anyone want to build it would use radiation emitted a super-precise clock in the hope when the nucleus is excited to that its tick drifts as t ime goes by? a high energy state, and then That's what is driving a team that drops into a lower energy state . is trying to build the first nuclear "All the electrons are going to clock, with a tick based on the sit in exactly the same place as antics of an atomic nucleus. They they normally sit," says Alex reason that the behaviour of the Kuzmich of the Georgia Institute clock could show whether certain of'Technology in Atlanta. "It's forces of nature fluctuate in a way the nucleus that's going to make that is predicted by some exotic a t ransit ion." theories of physics. The trouble is that most such transitions within th e nucleus The most accurate clocks we have are the so-called atomic emit high-energy X-rays or clocks. They exploit the fact that gamma rays, and these are tough an atom of caesium, or some to work with. An exception is other elem ent, emits visible thorium-229, an isotope light or microwaves when one produced in nuclear reactors of its electrons drops from a that has three fewer neutrons high energy state to a lower one. than the only naturally occurring The frequency of these emissions isotope, thorium-232. Its nucleus are so precisely predictable that is predicted to emit and absorb it can act like the t ick of a highly ultraviolet light. accurate clock. Atomic clocks As a first step towards building provide the super-accurate t iming a nuclear clock, Kuzm ich and needed for GPS satellites and to his colleagues have recorded the define the length of a second. ligh t given off by excited electrons in thorium-229 ions. The team A nuclear clock would be David Sh iga
LASERS COULD HELP BUILD A NUCLEAR CLOCK If nuclear clocks are possible, what about nuclear lasers? Thorium could be the key to building those too. Lasers have been made from a wide variety of materials. To date, they all work by exciting electrons that are either floating freely or in atoms, prompting the emission of a burst
crystals made mostly of lithium, calcium, aluminium and fluorine, with a sprinkling of thorium. Recent experiments suggest the electrons in this material will not interfere with the propagation of light emitted by thorium nuclei (Physical Review Letters, DOl: 10.1103/PhysRevlett.
of light. In atoms of the isotope thorium-229, the energy levels in the nucleus are arranged in such a way
106.162501).1n other materials, this effect would make a nuclear laser fizzle.
that the nucleus could also be made to emit ultraviolet light (see main story). Eugene Tkalya of the Institute
Though conventional lasers that emit UV light already exist , Tkalya say s that thorium lasers could form
of Nuclear Physics at Moscow State University in Russia suggest s making a thorium laser by firing
the light source in a nuclear thorium clock, and help us uncover the properties and behaviour of the
conventional ultraviolet lasers at
thorium-229 nucleus's excited state.
12 1NewScientist 12 July 2011
What makes tho rium tick?
fired a laser at a solid thoriu m-229 approach. He and his colleagues target in a vacuum chamber. This plan to hit a thorium-229 target stripped electrons from some of using light from a particle the m aterial, and vaporised it. accelerator, which can be more A second set oflasers then slowed easily tuned across a wide range and cooled this ion vapour, while of wavelengths than a laser. magnet ic fields kept the ions A nuclear clock could be used from hitting the chamber walls. to test whether the strength of A th ird laser th en excited the elect rons in these trapped ions. "The electrons are going The team was able to record the to sit in the same place as normal. lt's the nucleus light given off as th e elect rons in individual ion s dropped to that will make a transition" a lower energy state (Physical Review Letters, DOl: 10.1103/ the fundam ental forces of nature PhysRevLett .106.223001). changes over time. Some theories, To turn th is set-up into a including string th eory, predict nuclear clock, the team now needs that they should drift, and there to hit upon the precise frequency are some tentat ive hints of such oflight needed to excite the changes from astronomical thorium-229 nuclei - and observe measurements. the light emitted when it drops The frequencies of radiation back in energy. "If one of the ions emitted by an atomic clock makes this nuclear transition, are closely tied to a parameter we should be able to observe it called alpha, which governs the righ t away," says Kuzmich. Th is strength of the electrom agnetic will require painstakingly firing force. By contrast, the frequency lasers of different frequencies of a nuclear clock depends on at the trapped ions, watching for the strength of the strong nuclear when they emit light. force. So if the relative strength of these forces changes, it would The team's results are "really exciting" and "a huge step" show up as a divergen ce in the towards m aking a nuclear clock, time kept by a nuclear clock says Eric Hudson of the University compared with an atomic clock, of California, Los Angeles, who a tech nique that could be the is not a member of the team and most sensitive yet for seeing is working on an alternative this effect. •
FINANCIAL TIMES Gldeon Ractunan What to expect when China
Core competence lmprov~ the &Jobal regula ben of
becomes No.l
r '
Geithner warns on
light-touch oversight
Lut updated: 425pm Global martlet m11p
The US Treasury secretary warm. 0\"Cl"'iWS
.....
markets against
unden:utting Amencan financial regutaclons, Ul"gU\Jt them to avoid the 'tr.rgk' ""lmPlt> M't b)' lht' UK
c
__I*' c
..._
I! i t -
hi
C
r ce
¥ M .i
··- --·- .....
I j
j
THIS WEEK
Stress is inherited via faulty DNA zip Andy Coghlan
st ressed celL If that cell h appens to be an egg or sperm, the altered chromatin will end u p in every cell in any offspring. Ishii pinpointed this mechanism by altering fruit flies to give them a gen e for red eyes. The gene was positioned so that it would be active on ly if chromatin was unzipped, m aking it easy to spot whether ATF-2 had been detached an d th e ch romatin h ad been altered. Ishii put one generation of mutated fruit flies under stress by heating the eggs from which they hatched, or exposing the eggs to salty water. After they had m atured t o adulthood, he m ated them with healthy flies and found that the unzipped ch rom at in and red eyes - passed to the second, but not third generation. But wh en Ishii put both th e first and the second generations under st ress, the effects were
MUTANT fruit flies h ave helped solve one of the biggest puzzles in genetics: how the damaging effects of stress can pass down th e generations to children and grandchildren. Stress is thought to cause "epigenetic" changes to genes, which do not alter the sequence of their DNA but instead leave chemical marks that dictate how active genes are. If mice are st ressed for two weeks after birth, for example, their offspring will show signs of depression and anxiety, despite enjoying the Poorer health for grand kids too usual levels of maternal care. There is mounting evidence th at common health problems including diabetes, obesity, mental illness and even feeling fear could be the result of stress on parents and grandparent s. Until now no one has been able to identify changes in inherited "Once the protein is DNA that might explain h ow detached, the chromatin these effects are passed on. structure opens, activating Shunsuke Ishii at the Riken genes that were hidden" Tsukuba Inst itute in Ibaraki, Japan, and colleagues have now identified a plausible process. "We more prolonged, influencing not believe we can convince many just one but three subsequent sceptics by clarifying the generations (Cell, DOl: 10.1016/ mech anism," says Ishii. j.celL2011 .05.029 ). His team discovered that He says th at mammals have a chemical or environmental counterpart to ATF-2 called ATF-7. What do octopus and mammal eyes tell us stress detaches a protein called Last year, his team found t hat activat ing transcription factor 2 psychological stress could alt er about repeated patterns in evolution? (ATF-2) from chromat in, the ATF-7 in mice, leading to changes What about hummingbirds and sunbirds? densely packed DNA th at makes in chromatin. Ishii's team st ill To find out visit www.mapoflife.org and up chromosomes. needs to do experiment s to see if e xplore amazing cases of biological converge nce ATF-2 behaves as a kind of these changes are heritable. zipper, keeping the ch romatin "What's really exciting is from througho ut the living world. tightly bound. Once it is detached, that this study shows a clear .IIJIII UNTVEHSITY Of jOll:" TEM PU:TO~ FO~D.HIOii the chromatin structure opens, molecular mech anism that V CAMBR I DG E ,.,..,.,.,, ,..,. •mn-, ·m "''"'"'''" facebool< WORDPRESS activating genes th at would responds to stress," says Moshe normally stay hidden. Szyf, who researches the Crucially, the unzipped implications of epigenetics chrom at in is inherited by all for cancer therapy at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. • descendants of the original
AP OF LIFE
CONVERGENT EVOLUTION ONLINE
www.mapoflife.org
p: lnd
14 1NewScientist IZJuly 2011
.~~
f>"
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
If you spot an illusion do you ever ask why? THOSE who find optical illusions easy to solve might be less inclined to ask themselves why. lt seems the human brain may have a trade-off between processing visual information and introspection. Chen Song and her colleagues at University College London found last year that people with more grey matter in the primary visual cortex were better at solving visual illusions. The team has now looked for size differences elsewhere in the brain that correlate with variation in the visual cortex. They used a functional MRI scanner to build a map of the primary visual cortex of 30 volunteers while also capturing a structural image of their brains. Running the images through a
SSE_Advert_exhibrtion.Jand..242x 142mm.indd 1
"
:::>
~
:!' z :z
i
;5 u "' iX
if
_ _, Baffling for some computer, Song was surprised to find a relationship between the primary visual cortex and a region at the front of the brain called the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC). When people have a bigger anterior prefrontal cortex, they have a smaller visual cortex, and vice versa:· she says Uournal of Neuroscience, DOl: 10.1523/jneu rosci.0308-11.2011). Previous research has shown
that the size of the aPFC is linked to introspection - individuals with more grey matter in this brain region are better able to assess whether they made the right decision. Song~ study suggests that more introspective individuals forego finer aspects of visual perception. The team will now carry out behavioural studies to find out if this is the case. What could be behind this
relationship? Animal studies have shown t hat some genes involved in brain development are expressed at differing levels along the anteriorposterior axis of the brain;· says Song. Those differences might be most stark when comparing structures at opposite ends of the cortex - such as the aPFC and primary visual cortex. Elliot Freeman at City University in London agrees that the results are a surprise. But bigger is not necessarily better in terms of brain power," he says. Despite evidence that a large aPFC might be linked to better introspection, a small aPFC might be beneficial too, Freeman says. lt might be better to have fewer synaptic connections for more focused and coherent decision making." However, more neurons in the visual cortex might boost resolution in visual processing, Freeman adds. A brain with more visual volume and less frontal volume might actually work better." j essica Hamzelou •
2116111 13:07:()6
2 July 2011 1NewScientist 115
IN BRIEF The hidden stress of ecotourism ECOTOURISTS are doing monkeys n o favours by sharing their picnic with them. Wildlife tourism is already thought to stress m any species. To study its effect on Barbary macaques (M acaca sy lvan us) in the Moroccan Atlas m ountains, Laetitia Marechal and Stuart Semple of the University of Roehampton, London, recorded levels of glucocorticoid hormonesan indicator of stress - in the m onkeys' faeces. Th ey also monitored rates of self-scratching, which relates to anxiety. The researchers found that even something as seemingly innocuous as taking a ph oto or feeding the m acaques increased the likelihood of anxiety, while aggression from tourists pushed them int o full-blown stress (Biological Conservation, DOl : gauged the birds' sense of syntax by playing jumbled
Finches' tweets knock humans off their perch
"ungrammat ical" re mixes of finch songs to the birds and measuring the response calls.
HUMANS may not be the only species to have rules of syntax dictating how words can and cannot be put
One way they did this was by playing unfamiliar songs repeatedly until the birds got used to the m and stopped overreacting. They then jumbled up syllables
together. The songs of Bengal finches appear to have similar grammatical rules. "Songbirds have a spontaneous ability to process syntactic structures in thei r songs;'
w it hin each song and replayed these versions to t he birds. The birds reacted to only one of the f our jumbled versions, as if they noticed it violated some rule of
says Kentaro Abe of Kyot o University, j apan, who has been putting the birds' grammatical abilities to the t est. In the wild, Bengal finches call back vigorously when
grammar, w hereas the other t hree remixes didn't. Almost 90 per cent of t he birds tested responded in this way (Nature Neuroscience, DOl: 10.1038/nn.2869).
they hear unfamiliar songs, usually f rom intruding finches. In t he lab, Abe and colleague Dai Watanabe of the japan Science and Technology Agency in Saitam a
"This indicates the existence of a specif ic rule in t he sequential orderings of syllables in their songs, shared within the social community," Abe says.
Famous black hole reveals vital statistics SOME black holes keep a t ight hold on everything, even their own vital statistics. Now Cygnus X-1, the first black hole discovered, has divulged its distance from Earth and in turn its weight and that it was born spinning. Cygnus X-1 was identified as a likely black hole in 1972, but its distance from Earth has been maddeningly difficult to pin down. This in turn h as made 16 1NewScientist I ZJuly 2011
it hard to determine basic properties like its mass and spin. Mark Reid of the HarvardSrnithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massach usetts, and colleagues used the Very Long Baseline Array of radio telescopes spanning the US to measure the object's parallax - tiny shifts in its apparent position due to Earth's motion around the sun. Based
on the size of the sh ifts, Cygnus X-1 is 6ooo light years away, give or take a few hundred light years, the team reports (arxiv.org/ abs/1106.3688). Combining this measurement with oth er information revealed a rapid spin rate and the m ass of the black hole to be 14.8 times the sun's (arxiv.org/abs/uo6,368g). It was likely born in a spin as it would not have had enough time to "spin up'' by stealing gas from its companion star.
10.1016/ j.biocon.2011.0 5.010). Such studies are vital to help establish guidelines, says Semple.
Cream slows snake venom's invasion DEADLYsnake-bite venom could be slowed on it s way into the blood by a cream applied to the bite site, giving victim s time to seek help. Snake bites penet rate tissue, not blood vessels, so most of the toxins enter the blood via the lymphatic system. To slow this journey, Dirk van Helden at the University of Newcastle at Callaghan, Australia, and colleagues applied nitric oxide cream - which stops the pum ping of the lymphatic system - to mice injected with venom. Th e cream increased th e time it took the venom to reach the blood supply from 65 to g6 minutes (Nature Medicine, DOl: 10.1038/n m .2382). This would buy bite victims around so per cent m ore time to seek t reatment, says van Helden.
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
Python genes get Yeast points way to making old cells young again frantic after meals CHILDREN typically h ave t he they acquire clumps of p roteins lifespan (Science, DOl: 10.1126/ A BURMESE python that has just eaten a goat may look like it's resting, but on the inside it's frantic. The python's digestion switches on an unusually large number of genes. Pythons eat large meals very infrequently. To conserve energy between meals, they mothball their innards, substantially shrinking most of their internal organs. Then, after a meal, their intestines more than double in mass, and the heart and kidneys increase by half. This involves a huge amount of genetic turmoil. To find out just how much, Todd Castoe and colleagues at the University of Colorado at Denver measured gene activity in the organs of Burmese pythons,
same life expectancy at birth, regardless of whether their father is 20 years old or 8o. This must mean that the man's reproductive cells somehow reset their clocks, but how th ey do this h as been a mystery. Now a gene t hat reverses ageing effects in yeast is providing some clues. Under stressful conditions yeast cells forgo asexual reproduction an d sp lit into four spores, each containing half the chromosomes of a typical cell, like human eggs and sperm. As the cells get older,
and extra p ieces of DNA, but when Angelika Amon at the Massachusett s Inst itute of Technology and colleagues tracked spores from old an d young yeast cells they found th at such abnormalities disappeared, meaning all spores h ad the same lifesp an. Clumped protein seems to be cleared through autophagy, in wh ich the cell "eats" itself. During sporulation, a gene called NDT8o was expressed. What's more, switching on NDT8o in ageing cells doubled their
science.1204349). The closest relative ofNDT8o in mammals is p53, a gene th at regulates cell cycles. "We may h ave found a way to rejuvenate cells and erase ageing m arkers," says Am on. The paper is "provocat ive", says Michal Jazwinski at Tulane Un iversity in New Orleans, Louisiana: "People have attempted to examine what rejuvenates gametes for some time.lt looks like NDT8o is playing an important role - it narrows down th e t erritory to be examined."
Jet-setting worm has first-class DNA
Python mo/urus bivittotus, before and immediately after meals. About 1800 dormant genes switched on within 24 hours of a meal, they reported last week at the Society for the Study of Evolution meeting in Norman, Oklahoma. Similar activation also occurs in the liver, kidney and intestines, they say. This is a staggering change: previously only a few dozen and up to a few hundred genes had been seen to change to cope with new conditions. Even the transition from an unfertilised egg to a 4-celled embryo - one of the biggest changes in an organism's life involves fewer than 3000 genes, a previous study has found .
YOU would probably expect worm s in California and France to h ave different gen es, even within one species. Not so for a stretch of ch romosome from the laboratory workhorse Caenorhabditis elegans.
Joshua Shapiro ofPrinceton Un iversity and his colleagues compared about 40,000 genetic markers from 97 wild strains collected around the world. Those on chromosome 5 were virtually identical in the vast m ajority of worms, they reported last week at a meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolu tion in Norman, Oklahoma. Such a pattern can only be the result of strong natural selection for a gene, which would have caused all neighbouring genes to be selected as well. Based on the size of this "selective sweep", Shapiro calculates that the favoured gene variant arose 100 to 200 years ago and has since spread across the world, m ost likely by hitch-hiking with human migrat ions. ''This is the first time we h ave seen a natural selective sweep of this much DNA," says Dee Denver at Oregon State Un iversity in Corvallis.
'Broken' toy shows infants' rationality INFANTS can work out where the
17 infants soon turned to another toy.
fault lies when a toy fails to work. Hyowon Gweon at Massachusetts
In a separate trial, one adult's button presses always worked, while the second adult's always failed.
Institute of Technology tested 16-month-olds' reasoning using a toy that could be worked by pressing a button. Two adults showed an infant how to play with the toy, but both could make it work correctly just one time in two tries. They then passed the toy to the child- exceptthat now, the button was no longer active. The infants appeared able to work outthat the toy was faulty, given that both adults had previously had trouble making it work: 12 out of
When the toy didn't work for the infant, they appeared to reason they were doing something wrong, like the unsuccessful adult -13 out of 19 children passed the toy to their parents for help (Science, DOl: 10.1126/science.1204493). Sara Cordes at Boston College in Massachusetts says the findings fit with current ideas about child cognition: "Infants are little adults when it comes to problem solving."
2 July 20111 NewScientist 117
N=f(f,:n,.·£·h·fc ·I
~it= ik.r"W ;r,. ___
£,v'-H
You don't need to be a scientist to be an expert.
New Scientist delivers the highest quality scientific content from the world's most reputable sources in a comprehensive and easy to digest format.
With our monthly Instant Expert series we'll guide you through Astrobiology, Mass Extinctions, Dark Matter and much more. Your weekly issue will keep you up-to-date with the latest space news, technological developments, and breakthroughs in healthcare and environmental science. Get all of this, together with access to our online archive for less than two dollars per issue.
To save over 60°/o off the cover price, subscribe at newscientist.com/s/5305
TECHNOLOGY
For more technology stories, v isit newscientist.com/technology
including researchers at the University ofLiverpool in the UK and the Swiss Federal Institute ofTechnology in Lausanne (EPFL) - aim to establish rules for autonomous flight, including sensing, flocking, control and simulation, and to develop simple user interfaces for pilots. Accurate sensing will be at the heart of it all. At EPFL, Dario
"lt is now a question of when we'll get personal aerial vehicles, not if we'll get them" Floreano's team is investigat ing what mix of anti-collision sensors Who n eed s a pilot's licence? PAVs might need. He envisages each craft pinging radio signals to all the others and measuring the signals' return time to keep a safe distance. "It will work even when GPS is not available," Floreano says, adding that such a system is Technology to avoid mid-air collisions will be vital when now being test ed on a swarm of we/ve all got our own personal helicopter... 10 four-rotor robots, as part of the EC-funded Swarmanoid project. PAVs is not quite so fan tastic? Floreano's team has already thanks to recent developments Paul Marks Witness Terrafugia, he says, a in helicopter drones. developed image sensors with a WHO wouldn't like to have their spin-off from the Massachusetts wraparound view like that of an Despite Terrafugia's progress, own personal flying machine Institute of Technology, based MyCopter is only focusing on insect's compound eye. If visibility tucked away in the garage? It's helicopter-style PAVs because they is poor, acoustic sensors may do in Woburn. The firm hopes next year to launch the Transition, a won't need a runway: you can take the trick. "You can work out the a nice thought, if perhaps a little far-fetched. off from a parking space. "We are speed and direction of approaching lightweight propeller-powered Be that as it may, the European aircraft that can land on a runway, looking at vertical take-off and aircraft from the sound they Commission is taking the landing because we don't want make," Floreano says. Radar and fold its wings and be driven away prospect seriously. And it is like a car- although not everything to use airports for air commuting. laser-based sensors (lidar) will already worried about how has gone to plan (see "Flying cars: There's a problem, however: we also be tested. The EPFL team squadrons of non-expert pilots don't expect the average car driver hopes to build a demonstrat ion a chequered history"). What's are going to cope with this threemore, technologies for lofting to know how to fly a helicopter." sensor array by 2014. dimensional freedom. Will air and propelling small aircraft To begin to address this, PA Vs might not be entirely hogs cause mid-air collisions? are maturing fast, BU!thoff says, MyCopter project members autonom ous, says BU!thoff. You That's why the EC has kicked should be able to override them, off a €4.3 million research project, just as drivers can ignore satnav directions in a car, he says. called MyCopter, that aims to ensure "personal aerial vehicles" Fortunately, MyCopter will (PAVs) can fly automatically in neat, That flying cars are a long-held dream but never went into mass production. have other applications before is evident from the patent record: NowTerrafugia, an MIT spin-off, we eventually take delivery of well-spaced "swarms" by sensing one was patented in France three is hoping Its Transition flying car will the other vehicles around them. our first personal helicopter: the "It is now a question of when months before the Wright brothers' triumph. lt is built from lightweight flocking algorithms developed we'll get personal aerial vehicles, first powered flight in 1903. But carbon fibre composites and has a will make it easier for drones to tly not if we'll get them," claims in civilian airspace, and simpler success has eluded all comers. light. powerful engine. But after a successful test flight in March 2009 Heinrich Billthoff of the Max In 1917, the Wrights' arch-rival user interfaces could make it Planck Institute for Biological Glenn Curtiss built a flying car that problems with suppliers have slowed easier to fly them. As for replacing progress: a demo flight this year has would only hop. In 1956 Moulton cars, th e technology's there, says Cybernetics in Tiibingen, Taylor's Aerocar took to the US skies. been postponed to 2012. Germany, who heads the project. Biilthoff. "Making it affordable is Why does he think the idea of another question." •
out o trou.....,., e
Flying cars: a chequered history
Zj uly 20111 NewScientist 119
TECHNOLOGY
e . . . . owero
ou
Severely disabled people can control their environment without invasive implants Duncan Graham-Rowe TWO friends meet in a bar in the online environment Second Life to chat about their latest tweets and favourite TV shows. Nothing unusual in that- except that both of them have Lou Gehrig's disease, otherwise known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and it has left them so severely paralysed that they can only move their eyes. These Second Lifers are just two of more than so severely disabled people who have been trying out a sophisticated new brain-computer interface (BCI). Second Life has been controlled using BCis before, but only to a very rudimentary level. The new interface, developed by medical engineering company G.Tec of Schiedlberg, Austria, lets users freely explore 20 I NewScientist I2July 2011
Second Life's virtual world and control their avatar within it. It can be used to give people control over their real-world environment too: opening and closing doors, controlling the TV, lights, thermostat and intercom,
~
answering the phone, or even publishing Twitter posts. The system was developed as part of a pan-European project called Smart Homes for All, and is the first time the latest BCI technology h as been combined with smart-home technology and online gaming. It uses electroencephalograph (EEG) caps to pick up brain signals, which
Brain control Detecting peopl e~ brainwaves gives them control over their environment
A screen displays 40 or
more icons which flash in random order. To activate a command the user focuses their attention on the appropriate icon
When the icon flashes, an involuntary change in the brainwaves (P300 spike) occurs. Software identifies the icon from the timing of the spike, and sends an appropriate command to a controller
it translates into commands that are relayed to controllers in the building, or to navigate and communicate within Second Life and Twitter. In the past, one of the problems with BCis has been their reliability, and they have tended to be limited in the number offunctions that can be controlled at once, says John Gan of the BCI group at the University of Essex, UK. Like most BCI systems, G.Tec's interface exploits an involuntary increase in a brain signal called P300 that occurs in response to an unexpected event. To activate a command, the user focuses their attention on the corresponding icon on a screen, such as "Lights On", while the EEG cap records their P300. The icons are flashed randomly, one at a time, and it is possible to tell which icon they are looking at by correlating a spike in the P300 with the timing of when that icon flashes, says Guenter Edlinger, G.Tec's CEO. He will be presenting the system at the Human and Computer Interact ion International conference in Orlando, Florida, this month. G.Tec's system works better, the more functions are added. That is because when there are more icons on the screen, it comes as a bigger surprise when the target icon flashes, creating a stronger P300 response. More than 40 icons can be displayed at once and submenus make it possible to add even more options. G.Tec's system has been tested at the Santa Lucia Foundation Hospital in Rome, Italy. "BC Is are definitely beginning to make the transition out of the lab," says Ricardo Chavarriaga, a BCI researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute ofTechnology in Lausanne. G.Tec says it is working on adding wheelchair control as a function, to help give users more mobility. "The point is that they can start making their own decisions," says Edlinger. •
For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology
Robo-snapper learns how to take the perfect photo PAPARAZZI could soon be fighting for their jobs with robots that can take aesthetically pleasing photos. To create such a robot, Raghudeep Gad de, a computer scientist at the International Institute of Information Technology in Hydra bad, India, turned to a humanoid robot called NAO that is equipped with a head-mounted camera. He and his team have programmed NAO to obey two simple photographic guidelines known as the rule of thirds and the golden ratio. The former states that an image should be divided into three, both vert.ically and horizontally, with interesting features placed where the dividing lines cross. The latter suggests the horizon line should divide a photo into two rectang les with the larger being 1.62 times the size of the smaller - the golden ratio. The robot is also programmed to assess the quality of its photos by rating focus, lighting and colour. The researchers taught it what makes a great photo by analysing the top and bott om 10 per cent of 60,000 images from a website hosting a photography contest, as rated by humans. Armed with this knowledge, the robot can take photos when told to, then determine their quality. If the image scores below a certain quality threshold, the robot automatically makes another attempt. lt improves
on the first shot by working out the photo's deviation from t he guidelines and making the appropriate correction to its camera's orientation. Gadde, who w ill presentthe research at an artif icial intelligence conference in Barcelona, Spain, t his mont h, says t his makes the system very flexible. "Earlier photographer robot systems are predominantly limited to capturing photographs of humans," he says, because they rely on face or skin-colour detection. "Our approach is generic and does not rely on t he subject of the
" The robot obeys two photographic guidelines and then assesses the quality of the photos" image being captured." Bill Smart of Washington University in St Louis, who has also built a robot photographer, says the approach is an improvement on previous attempts. But robots still can't match human photographers because t hey can't recognise point s of int erest.• he adds. "Good compositions in photographs have interesting things in them, and there's no such thing as an 'interesting thing detector'." Gadde's system could be used to take formulaic photos t hat all follow certain ru les, such as actors' headshot s, he says. jacobAron •
Could a robot do it better?
2 July 20111 NewScientist 121
TECHNOLOGY combine two or more photographs photo they want to post online. The photo then goes through to create another very realistica "dewarping" stage, in which looking one that looks like it was taken from an arbitrary straight lines like walls and kerb viewpoint," explains Schaffer. angles are corrected for the new The images can come from AN IMAGE processing system that Peter Schaffer and Djamila Aouada point of view, and "hole filling", obscures the position from which at the University ofLuxembourg more than one source: what's in which nearby pixels are copied photographs are taken could help to find a way of disguising the important is that they are taken to fill in gaps in the image created protesters in repressive regimes photographer's viewpoint. at around the same time of a because some original elements were obscured. The result is pretty escape arrest- and give journalists Their method is to use graphics reasonably static scene from different viewing angles. Software convincing, says Schaffer. "There "plausible deniability" over the processors to artificially create provenance ofleaked photos. photos taken from a perspective then examines the pictures and are some image artefacts but they where there was no photographer. generates a 3D "depth map" of are acceptable," he says (arxiv.org/ The technology was conceived in September 2007, when the "We use a computer-vision the scene. Next, the user chooses abs/1106.2696). The team intends Burmese junta began arresting technique called view synthesis to an arbitrary viewing angle for a to make the software open source. Matthias Zwicker, a graphics people who had taken photos of the violence meted out by police ~ engineer at the University of « against pro-democracy protesters, ~ Bern in Switzerland, thinks the ""~ technology is on the right track. many of whom were monks. "Burmese government agents "Anonymising the photographer video-recorded the protests and ~ could be a crucial step in protecting analysed the footage to identify ~ the source of contentious material. "'~ I'm sure this computer-vision people with cameras," says ::> ~ technology will evolve into a security engineer Shishir Nagaraja of the Indraprastha Institute of ~ valuable tool:' Information Technology in Delhi, ~z Schaffer's team knows it is g0 entering an arms race of sorts: India. By checking the perspective of pictures subsequently published ~ even consumer-level imaging tools on the internet, the agents worked "' could help oppressive regimes. For out who was responsible for them. instance, University ofWashington If a photographer's "location and Google researchers last week privacy" is not protected, their unveiled software that can identify personal safety is at risk, Nagaraja as pecific person in every picture • says. This inspired him and in a large set of photos on a website computer-vision specialists lt's all about points of view like Flickr.com. Paul Marks •
Protecting protestors with photos that never existed
t <(
~
First, it aimed to identify a user's most significantfriends. ltthen noted the apps those friends were using. Finally, it worked out the probability that a given app is owned by a user, based member Wei Pan. 'We found it difficult." on what their closest friends owned. The team gave smartphones judging the importance of each running Google's Android software friend proved a tricky task. "We ended to 55 postgraduate students living up wanting to compute the optimum in university accommodation. Each social network, to describe exactly phone recorded masses of social interactions from several sources over "We wanted to compute the a period of five months: logging phone optimum social network, calls, detecting physical proximity to describe exactly who using Bluetooth and keeping track were your closest friends" of activity on Facebook. They also logged when each who were your closest friends;· says Pan. But data taken from a single student installed a new app from the more than 30,000 available source didn't offer enough insight. on the Android Market app store. So their software combined all the They created software that sources to predict a list of apps that a particular user had installed from the analysed these data in three stages.
Mining social networks to predict your app choices UNSURE which app to down load to your smartphone? While you waver, internet giants like Apple and Google could soon be predicting what you will install by analysing how you interact with your friends. Ateam at MIT's Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, analysed social-network behaviour among smartphone users to see if it could help forecast a pp down loads. The research could give developers a valuable insight into why someone chooses to download particular apps. "We thought, 'Can we use social networks to find which apps people might find interesting?'" says team 221 NewScientist I2July 2011
821 different ones downloaded by the entire group. On average across their tests, 45 per cent of the apps on each person's list was predicted correctly. In comparison, complete guesses were only about 10 per cent accurate (arxiv.org/abs/1106.0359). The work will be presented at an artificial intelligence conference in San Francisco in August. The technology could one day be rolled into any app, allowing developers to analyse social network data from a user's smartphone and shift their marketing focus accordingly. "They're reinforcing that we don't have one social network- it's the combined effect of networks that's important," says Bernie Hog an of the Oxford Internet Institute, UK. 'These guys are at the forefront of figuring out what to do with them." jamie Condliffe •
New Scientist video - the list keeps getting longer.
Search from hundreds of the most amazing, mind blowing and coolest videos. Take your seat and prepare to be amazed! So what are you waiting for? Watch exclusive videos today.
www.NewScientist.com/video
clentist
- - --
--
OPINION
cu ura The networked computer offers an antidote to media junk food. Why not choose the healthy option, says Peter Lunenfeld THINK of those fleeting moments when you look out of an aeroplane window and realise that, regardless of the indignities of commercial air travel, you are flying, higher than a bird, an Icarus safe from the sun. Now think of your laptop, thinner than a manila envelope, or your cellphone nestled in the palm of your hand. Take a moment or two to wonder at those marvels. You are the lucky inheritor of a dream come true. The second half of the 2oth century saw a collection of geniuses, warriors, pacifists, cranks, entrepreneurs and visionaries labour to create a fabulous machine that could function as a typewriter and printing press, studio and theatre, paintbrush and gallery, piano and radio, the mail as well as the mail carrier. Not only did they develop such a device but by the turn of the millennium they had also managed to embed it in a worldwide system accessed by billions of people every day. The networked computer is an amazing device, the first media machine that serves as the mode of production (you can make stuff), means of distribution (you can upload stuff to the network), site of reception (you can download stuff and interact with it), and locus of praise and critique (you can talk about the stuff you have downloaded or up loaded). The computer is the 21st century's culture machine. But for all the reasons there are to celebrate the computer, we must also tread with caution. This is because the networked 261 NewScientist 12 July 2011
--
--
Beavers build dams, birds make computer has sparked a secret war between downloading and nests and termites create mounds, up loading - between passive yet for t he most part, the animal consumption and active creation- kingdom moves through the whose outcome will shape our world downloading. Humans collective future in ways we are unique in their capacity can only begin to imagine. I call to not only make tools but then turn around and use them to it a secret war for two reasons. First, most people do not realise create superfluous material that there are strong commercial goods - paintings, sculpture and agendas at work to keep them architecture - and superfluous experiences- music, literature, in passive consumption mode. Second, the majority of people religion and philosophy. Of course, who use networked computers it is precisely these superfluous to up load are not even aware things that define human culture of the significance of what they are doing. "Failing to move beyond All animals download, but only downloading is to strip oneself of a defining a few up load anything besides constituent of humanity" faeces and their own bodies.
and ultimately what it is to be human. Downloading and consuming culture requires great skills, but failing to move beyond downloading is to strip oneself of a defining constituent of humanity. For all the possibilities of our new culture machines, most people are still stuck in download mode. Even after the advent of widespread social media, a pyramid of production remains, with a small number of people uploading material, a slightly larger group commenting on or modifying that content, and a huge percentage remaining content to just consume. One reason for the persistence of this pyramid of production is that for the past half-century, much of the world's media culture has been defined by a single medium - television - and television is defined by downloading. Television is a one-way spigot gushing into our homes. The hardest task that television asks of anyone is to turn the power off after they have turned it on. The networked computer offers the first chance in so years to reverse the flow, to encourage thoughtful downloading and, even more importantly, meaningful uploading. What counts as meaningful uploading? My definition revolves around the concept of"stickiness" - creations and experiences to which others adhere. Tweets about celebrity gaffes are not sticky but rather little Teflon balls of meaninglessness. In contrast, applications like tumblr.com,
Comment on these stories at newscientist.com/opinion
which allow users to combine pictures, words and other media in creative ways and then share them, have the potential to add stickiness by amusing, entertaining and enlightening others - and engendering more of the same. The explosion of apps for mobile phones and tablets means that even people with limited programming skills can now create sticky things. The challenge the computer mounts to television thus bears little similarity to one format being replaced by another in the manner of record players being replaced by CD players. It is far more profound than that, because it can bring about a radical break from the culture of television and a shift from a consumption model to a production model. This is a historic opportunity. Fifty years of television dominance has given birth to an unhealthy culture. Created like fizzy drinks and burgers by multinational conglomerates, the junk culture ofbroadcasting has turned us into intellectual diabetics. The cure is now in our collective grasp. It involves controlling and rationing our intake, or downloading, and increasing our levels of activity uploading. Not to break it down too much, watching is ingesting is downloading and making is exercising is uploading. Of course people will still download. Nobodyuploads more than a tiny percentage of the culture they consume. But the goal must be to establish a balance between consumption and production. Using the networked computer as a download-only device, or even a download-mainly device, is a wasted opportunity of historic proportions. • Peter Lunenfeld is a professor in the Design Media Arts department at the University of California, Los Angeles. This is adapted from his new book The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the computer as culture machine (The MIT Press)
One minute with ...
Shuzhuo Li Sex-selective abortion has left China with a massive gender imbalance. Meet the man behind the campaign to reverse it
How great is the gender imbalance in China?
In 2005, there were 32 million more men than women under the age of 20 in China. Young men with no prospect of marriage become a disruptive force in society. And with no one to marry, they will have no children and no one to take care of them when they are too old to work. Is the imbalance an unintended consequence of China's one-child policy?
Gender-selective abortions exacerbate the problem of dwindling birth rates. In China, a son is not just a source of pride, but a financial necessity. A daughter leaves home to join her husband's family after marriage, so her parents have no one to care for them in their old age. You kick-started the initiative to tackle the gender imbalance. How did you get involved?
My research in the mid-1990s investigating infant mortality rates uncovered a growing disparity between the number of boys and girls born in rural Shaanxi province.lt looked as if women were aborting female fetuses. That inspired us to conduct a pilot study to see if we could reduce the powerful culturaI preference for sons with a "Care for Girls" campaign. This was a success, and it was adopted as a national strategy. How does the Care for Girls campaign work?
lt is a huge propaganda campaign managed by the National Population and Family Pian ning Commission, which also enforces the one-child policy.lt uses adverts and public meetings to inform people about how dire the situation is, explaining how the gender imbalance could adversely affect their own family in the future.They give parents with daughters certain forms of financial assistance like low-interest loans, social security payments and special consideration for land allocation. That's the carrot. Is there a stick?
Care for Girls also cracks down on sex-selective abortion and the use of ultrasound to determine a fetus's gender. This has been prohibited by law for some time but it still happens.
PROFILE
Shuzhuo Li is a professor at the Institute for Population and Development Studies, Xi'an jiaotong University, China, and lead consultant on China's Care for Girls programme
How do you stop sex-selective abortion?
In rural areas it is easier to enforce the rules as most doctors are government employees. The local Family Planning Commission official may monitor pregnancies to ensure that mothers do not abort for reasons other than a medical issue. In cities the policy is harder to enforce, and a black market for sonogram services has emerged. Is the Care for Girls campaign working?
it's hard to say, as it has only operated on a national level for five years. Recent census data indicates that ratios are holding steady in most places. In one province, which in 1990 had the highest imbalance, the ratio dropped to 110 boys per 100 girls, comparable to that of South Korea, a nation seen as a successful model for reducing son preference. Turning policy into reality is really complicated. Refusing sex-selective abortions to parents may be good for China in the long run, but it creates hardship for couples who do not have a son. With Care for Girls, we try to compensate for that but it is still difficult to change long-held cultural values. "' Interview by Donna Hesterman
~ ~
:I:
"' 2 July 20111 NewScientist 127
OPINION INTERVIEW
e
I
I
I
Meteorite hunter Michael Farmer has travelled around the world in pursuit of his quarry, but came unstuck in Oman in January when he was found guilty of illegal mining and imprisoned. Released on 7 March, Farmer maintains he did not break the law. But as he tells Roger Highfield, he won't be going back
Why did you head to Oman in the first place?
How did you get help?
On 31 December last year I went on my zoth meteorite hunting expedition in Oman with my fellow hunter Robert Ward. I have studied the law there since the arrest of Russian and American hunters back in 2005 and I understand the practice to be legal.
Two days after our arrest I was interrogated, forced to sign a statement admitting guilt, then driven to a prosecutor's office, arriving at midnight on 15 January. I begged the prosecutor for a call and he refused, then thankfully after he sent me out to a waiting room, another person quietly handed me a cell phone, so I called my wife. It took a week
How did your meteorite hunting trip go?
I found 35 met eorites, including three more pieces of the Dhofar 1180 Lunar, which I'd originally found in 2005, and other nice things. On the last day we headed towards Dubai. At 1pm on 13 January we arrived at a roadblock in the town of Adam. There was nothing out of the ordinary, until the police rushed my car with M16 rifles. They were nice and did not seem to know why we were being arrested but they forced us out of our cars and ripped them apart, finding the meteorites. We were taken to the police station and interrogated for 10 hours. They had intelligence that we were coming. I think I know who had told them. After the arrest where did the police take you?
We were driven to Muscat, the capital of Oman, in shackles. We arrived at midnight and were taken to an interrogation centre in the Qurum district of the city. There we were stripped, put into separate rooms, about 9 by 9 by 12 feet, with a small pad on the floor and two blankets. The rooms were horribly filthy, crawling with roaches. There were things on the floors and walls which I decline to describe. A small light was on 24/7 so you never knew the time of day. We h eard people being beaten, crying, screaming and being dragged around. 28 I NewScientist I ZJuly 2011
"Not many people can say they have eaten a piece of the moon" for the American embassy to find us. Even so, we went to trial on 6 Feb, a 15-minute joke, as it was in Arabic. The judge asked one question and then sentenced us to six months in prison and a $250 fine for illegal mining operations. After sentencing where were you incarcerated?
We were sent to the Sumail central prison, which was clean and new. But we were the only two westemers in a prison ofthousands. We nearly starved to death. Another prisoner carved me a spoon out of a toilet cleaner chemical container. I still have it. At one point, special forces were brought in as some ofthe other cell blocks rioted and all hell broke loose, as part of wider protests in Oman. That's when things went really downhill and they surrounded the prison with tanks. We were scared for our lives. In March you appealed against your conviction for illegal mining and violating cultural heritage laws. How did you make your case?
I told the court that a meteorite is not an
Michael Farmer with one of his finds - a chondrite meteorite - before it all went wrong in Oman
artefact, and when asked how old it was, I said it was unknown. Robert also spoke at length, then our lawyer fought very hard for an hour or so over every aspect of Omani law. The judges left, came back 5 minutes later, looked at Robert and I and said in Arabic "Hall as", which means "finished", and then in perfect English, "You are released from prison". By then I had served two months of my sentence and lost nearly 40 pounds - I was offered less to eat than my pet cat eats in a day. I had nightmares for more than a month afterwards.
For more interviews and to add your comments, visit newscientist.com/opinion
PROALE
Michael Farmer became interested in meteorites 15 years ago when he visited the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show and bought his first one. He has made more than SO trips to Africa and earned 3 million frequent f lier miles on one airline alone. He sourced the Martian meteorite NWA 2975, a piece of which is being awarded to a lucky New Scientist eompetit ion winner this week
into thousands of pieces and not made it to the ground in a large enough piece. I was called by scientists who wanted to be sure it really was a stony meteorite. I was sure, since I dug it out of the mud! Afterwards, when I tried to leave Peru, the border police took us back to the crater and demanded thousands of dollars. When we refused, they threatened to put us in prison. We jumped in a taxi and drove to another border crossing and escaped. When we arrived in Bolivia and checked our email, we had one from the US embassy saying the local police had already reported our arrest.
-
I understand you have an unusual habit. What is it?
I've eaten a small piece of every moon rock and Mars rock that I have purchased or found. After all, not many people can say they have eaten a piece of the moon. And I know for a fact that numerous scientists have done the same. Do you have a favourite meteorite?
My favourite would have to be the Springwater pallasite, a stony-iron meteorite which was first found in Saskatch ewan, Canada, in 1931. My partner and I researched it for months, then did several trips scouting the location ~ and finally rediscovered the area where the S: ~ meteor h ad hit the ground, which had been . -----...a..-...;......;.........;......;...;..._ _.....;.._ _ __. ~ forgotten. We h ave been methodically search ing there for three years now and Is meteorite hunting illegal in Oman? museums and collections around the world have recovered many pieces, including the I h ave collected nearly a thousand meteorites knowingly risk life and limb. Those who are 52-kilogram ch unk wh ich was sold to th e from there, all legally in m y view. If they don't unwilling to take a risk usually gain little. Royal Ontario Museum last year. I have put so much time and effort into that one. like it, well then I say change the law. ~
Will you ever go back to Oman?
We were deported and can never return there. I h ave been enough times anyway. I do plan to return to North Africa. Do you regret your last trip there?
No. We have h ad adventures there that money can't buy. Those of you who have never taken a risk cannot understand that th ose of us who gather these stones that fill
Have you ever been arrested anywhere else in the world?
I have been arrested in northern Arizona, at Meteor Crater. But I was on state land, with a permit, so the court threw out the case. I was released and all my meteorites were returned. Three years ago we barely got out of Peru. We were there to study a big stone meteorite fall that made an impact crater 14 metres wide, near the village of Carancas. Models predicted that such a meteorite should have exploded
Do you plan to go meteorite hunting again and, if so, where?
I am trying to keep a lower profile these days I'm a little skittish after Om an. I have just returned from collect ing in Canada. The most danger we were in was getting stuck in the mud. In the summer I plan to go to the Arct ic in Sweden, which is nice and safe. I am lucky. How many people get to travel every part of the world to do their job? • Zjuly 20111 New Scientist 129
OPINION LETTERS One man's hacker... From Byron Rig by
In his review of Marcus Wohlsen's bookBiopunk(g April, p so), Jonathon Keats claimed that amateur science started in the t g6os, whereas it was actually founded by the" gentleman scientists" who established the entire scientific enterprise when it was considered fashionable to do chemical and electrical experiments at home. Keats also seems ambivalent about do-it-yourself science. He recognises its playful element, but seems to condone the "biohacking" label, with its overtones of illegitimacy. He even says the" greater threat" from DIYbioscience is to "mainstream thinking". Competition perhaps, but "threat"? Is an attempt to "crowdsource a cure for cancer" an attempt to "subvert academia"? It seems more likely that it is the wealth tied up in biotech that
has led to its amateur practice being labelled "hacking". I imagine most amateur scientists would say that the damaging applications of science have been almost exclusively perpetrated by governments and institutions, not by individuals. Bundoora, Victoria, Australia
Spiritual path From Dirk Pons
Markings and structures recently found in the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt have sparked much speculation (28 May, p 14). The Egyptians had a formalised style of writ ing for everything of importance. If it was worth noting, they did it properly. So the first assumption, as your article says, has to be that the less formal hieroglyphs found were left by stonemasons. They are in a small chamber at the end of a narrow tunnel
Enigma Number 1653
Cut-free SUSAN OENHAM
The image, right shows six dominoes forming a rectangle. The dotted line shows how the rectangle can be cut into two rectangles without cutting through a domino. I started again with a standard set of 28 dominoes and used some of them to make another rectangle. This time it was impossible to find a line that cuts it into two rectangles without cutting a domino. I then broke up that rectangle, added two further dominoes from
• .....,._..,.................._.e-1___.....
Kaiapoi, New Zealand
Bradford, West Yorkshire, VK From Steve Lockwood
I have always thought the gyroscopic effect ofbicycle wheels was negligible, as suggested by your feature on the physics of bike stability (28 May, p 44). When riding, I have never had the feeling of being "held upright" by such forces, which would also make turning difficult. Also, bikes with lightweight wheels would be less stable than ones with heavy wheels and I have never experienced any such effect. Frame geometry has always seemed the biggest factor in stability: a well-made bike leans into corners naturally, without any apparent resistance. If you are unlucky enough to have a geometry which causes understeer or oversteer, the experience can be quite fraught. Studley, Warwickshire, UK
lt can be done the set and used them all to make a new rectangle. Once again, it was impossible to find a line that cut this into two rectangles without cutting a domino. How many dominoes did I use in this last rectangle?
WIN £15 will be awarded to the sender of the first correct
answer opened on Wednesday 3 August The Editor's decision is final. Please send entries to Enigma 1653, New Scientist Lacon House, 84 Theobald's Road, London WClX 8NS, or to
[email protected] (please include your postal address). Answer to 1647 Fifth-division clincher: 943785 The winner A Harrison of Rugby, Warwickshire, UK
30 INewScientist I2July 2011
emanating from a tomb. The chamber is backed by a blocking stone with a rough carved door. There is nothing strange in this structure. The ancient Egyptians believed in symbolic representation, such as doors, and that spirits could pass through solid objects. Their rituals and votive inscriptions generally convey a deep sense of uncertainty about resurrect ion and anxiety about the journey to the afterlife. In that belief system it would be a nightmare to be resurrected but then set off in the wrong direction and miss out on eternal life. So a nice bit of guiding shaft could be reassuring. Once on the right path the blocking stone would not be a problem to t he spirit. There need not be another tomb beyond for the tunnel to have spiritual significance.
the reversed feedback, and eventually could swap both hands completely, with barely a wobble. However, this nearly caused a nasty accident when I showed my friend my new skill as we were cycling. His last words before hitting the ground were: ''I'm sure I can do that." Happily he forgave me and healed quickly. It just shows the amazing adaptability of the body, given suitable training. Just don't try it all at once!
From Rod Hi ne
In his observations on the factors influencing bicycle stability, Jerry Cain stated that crashes were "inevitable if we crossed our arms on the handlebars" (Letters, 18 June). I beg to differ. Riding in Cambridge, UK, as an undergraduate in 1964, I experimented by moving one hand to the ot her side but close to the steering axis, keeping the other hand firmly in the correct place on the handlebar grip. This way I gradually learned
There is hope From John Zimmerman
Your story "Land-grab strategy doesn't hold water" (28 May, p 10), on the flow of virtual water between countries in the form offood imports, omitted a significant element. As humanity continues to do more with less, we can look forward to technology that will make more efficient use of water resources. This will also diminish the connection between available water and population growth. Hopkinton, New Hampshire, US
To join the debate, visit newscientist.com/letters
Waste not, want not From Susannah Batstone
In your feature on"d ark earths", the waste from ancient human settlements is credited with the creation of patches of enriched forest soil (4 June, p 42). I would imagine the largest contributor in that category would be the addition of human excreta. Such waste, incorporating energy, trace elements and minerals gathered from a wide area as part of the diet, would have enriched the midden areas. In the same way, the" night soil" collected from households before sewerage systems were introduced gave rise to the rich, dark soils of city allotments. Some Asian societies still view human excreta as a resource, and if kept separate from water and industrial wastes, and handled to
Mirrabooka, Western Australia
I is the net energy balance, as defined by the difference between the energy gained from eating a certain food minus that used in obtaining it. If you have to hunt, energy expenditure can become a serious problem, and the energy spent may exceed that in the captured prey. So managing animals can be a better option if game is scarce. Hannover, Germany
Endless energy
r:' () "'' D;q y S oM C'OtJ & W 11. ACfl~oL
with their high-birth rates, destined to remain autocracies, while developed ones, with their low birth·rates, remain democracies? Of course not. This construction is as erroneous as evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill's theory of a link between infectious disease and democracy (21 May, p 34). A strong and secure middle class, along with other complex historical factors, allowed democracy to flourish in the west. Perhaps in emerging democracies we will see other factors emerge. Whatever they are, they will reflect complex cultural, ideological, historical and political factors. It is unlikely to be a simple outcome of diseasecontrol measures.
11
From Bob Humphrey
--
None of the descriptions of the "many worlds" theory (4 June, p 8) I have seen gives any indication of where the energy to create the infinite number of new universes comes from. The energy of the big bang seems trivial in comparison. Any theory which posits the ongoing creation of the infinite amount of energy that would be required sounds a lot like a modern reworking of the steady state theory.
/o N A L. p. £ Tr"'11\l E"..,.,.._
- ..
-minimise risks from pathogens and parasites, it is one of the few natural resources that is not running out.
Bristol, UK
l lfracombe, Devon, UK
In theory
Fast food From Jorg Michael
From Ju/ie £/lender
Consider this chain of reasoning. High birth rates produce high oxytocin levels across a population. This hormone has been linked to conservative tribal loyalty and suspicion of outsiders. Low birth rates produce less oxytocin, less tribal loyalty, an openness to non-familiar others and more liberal politics. So are developing countries,
As part of her otherwise excellent article on the origins of animal domestication (28 May, p 32), Pat Shipman wrote that the clincher for the case against domestication being solely for food was: "A domestic animal that is slaughtered for food yields little more meat than a wild one that has been hunted, yet requires more management and care." In fact, what really matters
Bipolar concern From Mic Starbuck
Jon Ronson asserts that bipolar disorder is a misdiagnosis in young children (4 June, p 44). In the US, such diagnosis has caused controversy, but in the UK the problem is the ultraconservatism of the bulk of the medical profession in failing to identify and treat bipolar, an often lethal illness, until early adulthood. By that time, for many of us the patterns of highs and lows have already become chronically established. This is not a trivial issue, and as a genetic test comes closer for this often heritable complaint, the demand for early and effective intervention will rise.
nature, such as prison, we would not adapt well (4 June, p 32). The obvious conclusion is that incarceration worsens mental states. This presumably would affect behaviour, with a probable impact on recidivism. Ethicists question the role and efficacy of punishment. It is clear that being removed from a natural environment adversely affects human psychological well-being. Should this influence policy on treatment of prisoners? Wimborne, Dorset, UK
Virtual chat From Nick Eskow
The problem oflanguage in interactive cinema (4 June, p so) reminded me ofDavid Cronenberg's film eXistenZ. Through Jude Law's character's exploration of an immersive virtual world, it does a hilarious job of capturing the awkward, unnatural speech patterns of nonplayer characters in video games. In order to advance the plot, characters only say what they are programmed to say in response to keywords. So these characters look, feel, and speak naturally- except that with every repet ition of "Hi, I'm [character name]" after an unrecognised phrase, the uncanny valley widens. Washington DC, US
For the record • In "The hardest problem" ( 4 June, p 36), the number of potential solutions for a 9 x 9 sudoku grid should have been 6.67 x 1021 •
Glasgow, UK
Letters should be sent to: Letters to the Editor, New Scientist 84 Theobald's Road, London WClX 8NS
New leaf
Fax: +44 (0} 20 76111280 Email:
[email protected]
From Richard Harris
Peter Kahn said that we thrive in a natural environment, and that while we can adapt to environments divorced from
Include your full postal address and telephone number. and a reference (issue. page number. title) to articles. We reserve the right to edit letters. Reed Business Information reserves the right to use any submissions sent to the letters column of New Sdentist magazine. in any other format.
Zj uly 20111 NewScientist 131
As we speak we give off hundreds of invisible emotional cues. Now there's a way to sense them, says Sally Adee
OSALIND PI CARD'S eyes were wide open. I couldn't blame her. We were sitting in her office at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology's Media Lab, and my questions were stunningly incisive. In fact, I began to suspect that I must be one ofthe savviest journalists she had ever met. Then Picard handed me a pair of special glasses. The instant I put them on I discovered that I had got it all terribly wrong. That look of admiration, I realised, was actually confusion and disagreement. Worse, she was bored out of her mind. I became privy to this knowledge because a little voice was whispering in my ear through a headphone attached to the glasses. It told me that Picard was" confused" or "disagreeing". All the while, a red light built into the specs was blinking above my right eye to warn me to stop talking. It was as though I had developed an extra sense. The glasses can send me this information thanks to a built-in camera linked to software that analyses Pi card's facial expressions. They' re just one example of a number of "social X-ray specs" that are set to transform how we interact with each other. By sensing emotions that we would otherwise miss, these technologies can thwart disastrous social gaffes and help us understand each other better. Some companies are already wiring up their employees with the technology, to help them improve how they communicate with customers. Our emotional intelligence is about to be boosted, but are we ready to broadcast feelings we might ,_ rather keep private? ~ We project many subtle facial expressions ::> ~ that mirror our feelings. In the 1970s, US ' ~ psychologist Paul Ekman identified a basic w ~ set of seven: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, ~ disgust, contempt and surprise. They
321 NewScientist I2 July 2011
became the foundation for a theory of lie detection, which posited that involuntary micro-expressions can briefly unmask deception before the liar restores a facade of honesty to their face. Though the theory was later debunked, the principle wasn't entirely unsound. In conversation, we pantomime certain emotions that act as social lubricants. We unconsciously nod to signal that we are following the other person's train of thought, for example, or squint a bit to indicate that we are losing track. Many of these signals can be misinterpreted - sometimes because different cultures have their own specific signals. More often, we fail to spot them altogether. During a face-to-face conversation, thousands of tiny indicators on a person's face - arching the brow, puckering or parting the lips add up to a series of non-verbal hints that augment our verbal communication. Blink, and you'll miss them.
"The instant I put the glasses on I discovered that I had got it all terribly wrong" The idea that technology could amplify these signals was first explored by Rana el Kaliouby at the University of Cambridge, UK. She wanted to help autistic people, who find it particularly hard to pick up on other people's emotions. El Kaliouby realised that the "Ekman seven" would not be particularly helpful for enhancing the average conversation: after all, how often do you expect to see expressions of contempt or disgust? So in zoos, she >
COVER STORY
2July 2011 1NewScientist 133
enlisted Simon Baron-Cohen, also at Cambridge, to help her identify a set of more relevant emotional facial states. They settled on six: thinking, agreeing, concentrating, interested- and, of course, the confused and disagreeing expressions with which I had become so uncomfortably familiar in my conversation with Pi card. To create this lexicon, they hired actors to mime the expressions, then asked volunteers to describe their meaning, taking the majority response as the accurate one. To build the prototype glasses that could exploit these signals, el Kaliouby worked with Picard, who is an electrical engineer. Inside the glasses is a camera the size of a rice grain connected to a wire snaking down to a piece of dedicated computing machinery about the size of a deck of cards. The camera tracks 24 "feature points" on your conversation partner's face, and software developed by Picard analyses their myriad micro-expressions, how often they appear and for how long. It then compares that data with its bank of known expressions (see diagram, page 35). While I spoke with Picard in her office, a computer screen coached me about her evolving facial expressions. But I could also get a summary of this information via an earphone and the glasses with the light on the lens. "If I were smiling and nodding, you'd get the green light," Pi card said. I cringed a little when I realised how often the red light had appeared during our conversation. The prototype proved popular with autistic people who were invited to test it. "They approached people and tested out new facial expressions on themselves and tried to elicit facial expressions from other people," Picard says. Eventually, she thinks the system could
"People are just not that good at it," says Picard. The software, by contrast, correctly identifies 64 per cent of the expressions. Picard and el Kaliouby have since set up a company called Affectiva, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, which is selling their expression recognition software. Their customers include companies that, for example, want to measure how people feel about their adverts or movie. And along with colleague Mohammed Hoque, they have been tuning their algorithms to pick up ever more subtle differences between expressions, such as smiles of delight and frustration, which can look very similar without context . Their algorithm does a better job of detecting the faint differences between those two smiles than people do. "The machines had an advantage over humans in analysing internal details of smiles," says Hoque. Affectiva is also in talks with a Japanese company that wants to use their algorithm to distinguish smiles on Japanese faces. The
l.))
"My concentration broke, and my true feelings revealed themselves again" be incorporated into a pair of augmentedreality glasses, which would overlay computer graphics onto the scene in front of the wearer. When Picard and el Kaliouby were calibrating their prototype, they were surprised to find ,_ that the average person only managed to ~ interpret, correctly, 54 per cent of Baron~ Cohen's expressions on real, non-acted faces. ~ This suggested to them that most people- not ~ just those with autism - could use some help ,_ ~ sensing the mood of people they are talking to.
-
341 NewScientist IZJuly 2011
•
Japanese have given names to 10 different types of smile - including bakushu (happy smile), shisho (inappropriate giggle), and terawari (acutely embarrassed smile). Picard says the software amplifies the cues we already volunteer, and does not extract information that a person is unwilling to share. It is certainly not a foolprooflie detector. When I interviewed Picard, I deliberately tried to look confused, and to some extent it worked. Still, it's hard to fool the machine for long. As soon as I became engaged in the conversation, my concentration broke and my t rue feelings revealed themselves again.
Subconscious cues Some of the cues we give off during conversations are much harder to fake. In addition to facial expressions, we radiate a panoply of involuntary "honest signals", a term identified by MIT Media Lab researcher Alex Pentland in the early 2000s to describe the social signals that we use to augment our language. They include body language such as gesture mirroring, and cues such as variations in the tone and pitch of the voice. We do respond to these cues, but often not consciously. If we were more aware of them in others and ourselves, then we would have a fuller picture of the social reality around us, and be able to react more deliberately. To capture these signals and depict them visually, Pentland worked with MIT doctoral students Daniel Olguin Olguin, Benjamin Waber and Taemie Kim to develop a small electronic badge that hangs around the neck. Its audio sensors record how aggressive the wearer is being, the pitch, volume and clip of their voice, and other factors. They called it the "jerk-o-meter". The information it gathers can be sent wirelessly to a smartphone or any other device that can display it graphically. It didn't take the group long to notice that they had stumbled onto a potent technology. For a start, it helped people realise when they were being either obnoxious or unduly selfeffacing. "Some people are just not good at being objective judges of their own social interactions," Kim says. But it isn't just individual behaviour that changes when people wear these devices. In a 10-day experiment in 2008, Japanese and American college students were given the task of building a complex contraption while wearing the next generation of jerk-o-meter- which by that t ime had been more diplomatically renamed a" sociometric
badge". As well as audio, their badge measured proximity to other people. At the end of the first day they were shown a diagram that represented three things: speaking frequency, speaking time, and who they interacted with. Each person was indicated by a dot, which ballooned for loquacious individuals and withered for quiet ones. Their tendency for monologues versus dialogue was represented by red for Hamlets and white for conversationalists. Their interactions were tracked by lines between them: thick iftwo participants were engaged in frequent conversation and hair-thin if they barely spoke. "We were visualising the social spaces between people," Kim says. The results were immediately telling. Take the case of "A", whose massive red dot dominated the first day. Having seen this, A appeared to do some soul-searching, because on the second day his dot had shrivelled to a faint white. By the end of the experiment, all the dots had gravitated towards more or less the same size and colour. Simply being able to see their role in a group made people behave differently, and caused the group dynamics to become more even. The entire group's emotional intelligence had increased (Physica A, vol378, p 59). The first test of the badges in the real world revealed that there was money to be made from these revelations. Pentland and his team upgraded the sociometric badges to analyse
What's in a face One way to help improve our recognition of other people's emotions is by measuring and analysing facial expressions. Technology developed by researchers at MITallows you to do this via a screen, or through glasses, while talking to the person whose emotions are being assessed Vision algorithm analyses 24 points on the face of the person you are talking to
]
•••••••11)•••••••••11111(
Earpiece and LED traffic lights on glasses display summary of information about the person you are talking to
Analyses head gestures and facial express1ons: e.g. head tilt. lip part pucker, smile • Confused
Aareeino • Oi!>i)greeing
Thinkmg • Concentrating
....
• lntertsted
Identifies facial emotions over time Overall responses portrayed as traffic light system: red = negative, amber = neutral, green = positive
I
EVENTUALLY A FULL RANGE OF INFORMATION COULD BE DISPLAYED GRAPHICALLY
the speech patterns of customer service representatives at Vertex Data Science in Liverpool, UK, which provides call centre services for a number of companies. This revealed that it is possible to identify units of speech that make a person sound persuasive, and hence to teach them how to sound more persuasive when talking to customers (International Journal of Organisational Design and Engineering, vol1, p 6g). The team claims that the technology
"The first real test of the badges showed there was money to be made from these revelations" could increase telephone sales performance by as m uch as 20 per cent. With results like these, it's not hard to see why businesses are taking a keen interest in the badges. Last month, Kim and Olguin used the results of their doctoral research to found a start-up called Sociometric Solutions that already has several customers, including Bank of America, a bank in the Czech Republic and a consulting firm. Some of our body's responses during a conversation are not designed for broadcast to another person - but it's possible to monitor those too. Your temperature and skin conductance can also reveal secrets about your emotional state, and Picard can tap them with a glove-like device called the QSensor. In response to stresses, good or bad, our skin becomes clammy, increasing its conductance, and the QSensor picks this up. Physiological responses can now even be tracked remotely, in principle without your consent. Last year, Picard and one of her graduate students showed that it was possible to measure heart rate without any surface contact with the body. They used software linked to an ordinary webcam to read information about heart rate, blood pressure and skin temperature based on, among other things, colour changes in the subject's face (Optics Express, vol18, p 10762}. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that these sensors could combine to populate the ultimate emotion-reading device. How would the world change if we could all read each other's social signals accurately? Baron-Cohen has already seen the benefits in his studies of people with Asperger's syndrome at the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, UK. "It's not a miracle cure," he says, but people > 2 July 20111 NewScientist 135
New reality goggles Augmented-reality glasses already make it possible to visualise what was once unseeable, by overlaying graphics onto your field of view. Add the right sensors and apps, and here are some of the things you might one day see through those specs In Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo, police officers can decide whether someone is a criminal just by looking at them. Their glasses scan the features of a face, and match them against a database of criminal mugshots. A red light blinks if there's a match. So far, tech like this is available mainly to governments, but that won't last. Facebook has recently turned on face recognition for its automatic photo tagging. AR software will likely soon interface with social networks, so that you will never again forget a name at a party- but anonymity in a crowd may become a thing of the past.
The recent E. coli outbreak in Germany shows how important it can be to know exactly what you are eating. One way to analyse food could be via "hyperspectral" imaging, which uses special sensors to image far more of the electromagnetic spectrum than the small window visible light normally allows. Bacteria and spoilt food give off specific signatures. And the proper sensors can identify bacteria, insect repellent. mysterious smells or contaminants on the chopping board. "it's like doing CSI on the fly," says Paul Lucey, who works on hyperspectral vision at the University of Hawaii.
Thad Starner at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta wears a small device he has built that looks like a monocle. lt can retrieve video, audio or text snippets of past conversations with people he has spoken with, and even provide real-time links between past chats and topics he is currently discussing. In principle, it could also be used to view other people's conversations, if that person allowed them to be shared.
The US military has built a radar-imaging device that can see through walls to capture 30 images of people and objects beyond.ln similar vein, Yaser Sheikh of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is building an augmented-reality system for cars that lets drivers see round a blind corner. Taking video from a camera focused on the part of the road hidden from t he driver, it distorts the image so that it appears on the AR display, letting the driver essentially see through the obstacle.
You could use microphones and speech-recognition technology to convert the voice of someone you are conversing with to scrolling, real time subtitles. Thad Starner uses a basic version of this technology on his wearable set. A more sophisticated app would include subtitles t hat appear under specific people in the form of speech bubbles. 361 NewScientist I2 July 2011
equipped with Picard's technology were learning extra social skills. Baron-Cohen says the wearers retained some ability to read emotions accurately after they removed the glasses. Such enhancements for the rest of the population might increase emotional intelligence through the generations. But giving people unfettered access to each other's emotions has dangers too, Baron-Cohen warns. 'The ability to read someone's emotions doesn't necessarily come with empathy," he says. Pi card is keen to stress that her technologies should not be used covertly, and that people should always be asked whether they wish to use them, rather than being forced to do so. Use of her gloves is by their very nature voluntary- you have to choose to wear them - but remote heart-rate monitoring does not require consent. Pentland takes a similar view on the need for privacy. Data generated by the sociometric badge data should only be visible to an employee, he says, and not be shared with an employer without the employee's consent.
"When I slipped on the glove, I got a taste of how it can feel to have my most private thoughts exposed" I got a taste of how it can feel to have my most private thoughts exposed when I slipped on one of Picard's Q Sensor gloves to measure my skin conductance. A purple neoprene band pressed two electrodes into the palm of my hand, measuring subtle moisture changes on my skin when my stress levels changed. I watched a trace on Picard's screen, reminiscent of a seismogram. "OK, now just think about anything that will make your heart beat faster," she told me. I immediately suppressed my first intrusive thought because I found it just too embarrassing - and stared in horror as the scribble nevertheless exploded into a vertical spike. "Wow," Pi card said, her eyes widening. "What was that?" I felt my face go beetroot red. Picard considered my reaction for a second. She didn't need a headset to know that if I aired this particular thought it might make our conversation rather awkward. "Never mind," she said, "I don't want to know." • Sally Adee is a technology features editor at New Scientist
DIF FERENT TYPESOF INTELLIGENCE Conside r the engineertg superio r spatial intelligence and the lawyer(g command of words and you have to wonde r whethe r there are differe nt types of intelligence. This quest ion was debated ferociously during the early decades of the 20th century. Charles Spearman, on one side, defend ed the omnipot ence of his genera l factor of int elligence, g. On t he other, Louis Thursto ne argued for seven primary abilitie s", includin g verbal comprehension (in which fema les excel) and spatial visualisati on (in which males excel). Thursto ne eventu ally conceded that all his primary abilitie s were suffuse d with the same g factor, while Spearman came t o accept t hat t here are multipl e subsidiary abilit ies in addit ion to g on which individu als differ. This one-plus-many resolut ion was not w idely accepte d unti1 1993, howev er. lt was then that American psychologist John B. Carroll published his three stratum theory" based on a monum ental reanaly sis of all factor analysis studies of intelligence (see Oiagram , right). At t he top is a single universal ability, g. Below this indivisi ble g are eight broad abilities , all composed mostly of g but each also containing a differe nt additiv e" that boosts performance in some broad domain such as visual percept ion or processing speed. These in t urn cont ribute t o dozens of narrow er abilities , each a complex compos ite of g, plus addit ives from the second level, toget her with life experiences and specialised aptit udes such as spatial scanning. This structu re makes sense of the many differen ces in ability bet ween individu als w ithout contrad icting the dominance of g. For example, an excelle nt engine er might have exceptional visuospatial percep tion togeth er with training to develo p special ist abilities. but above all a high standin g on the g factor. The one-plus-many idea also exposes the implausibility of multipl eintellige nce theo ries eagerly adopte d by educat ors in the 1980 s, w hich claimed that by tailorin g lessons to suit the individ ual(g specific streng th- visual. tactile or whatev er- all children can be highly intelligent in some way. ii I NewScientist 12 July 2011
The "three stratum theory" of intelligence recognises that there is a single general cognitiv e ability, g. with added input Genera l from a range of broad Intelligence and narrow abilities factor Broad abilitie s nUid mte io·· · e '- 7sta 1sed inh:: 1 \lence Processing speed Broad retrieval ability Broad cogmt1ve speed Broad visual perception Broad auditory percept on General and
Narrow abilitie s 64 specialised aptitudes 01 s il s that each relates to a specific broad ability
WHAT DO IQ TESTS MEASURE? A century ago, British psycho logist Charles SpE!anna' observed that individu als who do well on one m<>nta test tend to do well on all of them, no matter how differe nt the testsOiims, format or conten t. So, for example, your performance on a test of verbal ability predict s your score on one of mathem atical aptitud e, and vice versa. Spearman reasoned that all tests must therefo re tap into some deeper, general ability and he invente d a statisti cal method called factor analysis to extract this common factor from the web of positive correlations among tests. This showed that tests mostly measure the very same thing, which he labelled the genera l factor of intellig ence or g factor". In essence, g equates to an individual!!) ability to deal with cogniti ve comple xity. Spearmanl!) discovery lay neglec ted in the US until the 1970s, when psychologist Arthur jensen began system atically testing compe ting ideas about g. Might g be a mere artefac t of factor analysis? No, it lines up with diverse feature s of the brain, from relative size to processing speed. Might g be a cultura l artefact, just reflect.i ng the way people think in wester n societies? No, in all human groups - and in other species too most cogniti ve variatio n comes from variatio n in g. jensenl!) analyses t ransfor med the study of intellig ence, but while the existen ce of g is now genera lly accepted, it is still difficu lt to pin down. Like gravity, we cannot observe it directly, so must understand it from its effects. At t he behavioural level, g operate s as an indivisi ble force- a proficie ncy at mental ly manipu lating informa tion, which underg irds learnin g, reasoning, and spottin g and solving ~ problems in any domain. At the physiological level, ~ differen ces in g probab ly reflect differen ces in the ~ brain!!) overall efficien cy or integri ty. The genetic roots ~ of g are even more dispersed, probab ly emerging from
the joint actions of hundre ds if not thousa nds of genes, themse lves responding to differe nt environ ments. Higher g is a useful tool, but not a virtue. lt is especially handy when life tasks are complex, as they often are in school and work. 1t is also broadly protective of health and well -being, being associated with lower rates of health-damaging behaviour, chronic illness, post-t raumat ic stress disorder, Alzheim erl!) and premat ure death. Higher g helps an individu al get ahead socioeconomically but it has little connec tion with emotio nal well-be ing or happiness. Neithe r does it correlate with conscientiousness, which is a big factor in whethe r someone fulfils their intellec tual potenti al.
WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE? Intelligence matters to us. In surveys people rank it second only to good health. Women worldwide believe smarter men make better husband material. Entrepreneurs hawk brain-boosting games, foods, supplements and training programmes. And the media quickly broadcast any scientific study claiming to discover how we can make ourselves, or our children, smarter. Yet our keen private interest in intelligence is matched by a reluctance to acknowledge publicly that some people have more of it than others. Democratic people value social equality above all, so they mistrust anything that might generate or justify inequality- but intelligence is no more equally distributed in human populations than height is. This tension has led to rancorous controversy over intelligence and intelligence testing but it has also benefited the science by pushing it exceedingly hard. A century of clashes and stunning discoveries has upended assumptions and revealed some fascinating paradoxes. Intelligence is definitely not what most of us had imagined.
QUANTIFYING INTELLIGENCE
Alfred Binet invented the IQ test to identify those schoolchildren most in need of help
The first intelligence quotient (IQ) test was born of a desire to help the most vulnerable.ln 1904 the French
select talent from all social levels, but today their use can be considered
Ministry of Education commissioned psychologist Alfred Binetto find a practical way to identify children who would fail elementary school without special
contentious, partly because they do not find equal amounts of intelligence everywhere.
help. Binet assembled 30 short, objective questions on tasks such as naming an everyday object and identifying the heavier of two items. A child's
Nevertheless, intelligence testing continues because it has practical value. Many colleges, employers and
performance on these, he believed, would indicate whether their learning was "retarded" relative to their peers. His invention worked and its success spawned
the armed services still use paperand-pencil or computer-based
massive intelligence-testing programmes on both sides of the Atlantic. Organisations turned to IQ tests to screen large pools of applicants: military recruits for
intelligence tests to screen large groups of applicants. The gold standard, however, is the orally administered, one-on-one IQ test,
trainability, college applicants for academic potential and job applicants for employability and promotability. The tests were eagerly adopted at first as a way to
which requires little or no reading and writing. These include the StanfordBinet and Wechsler tests, which take between 30 and 90 minutes and combine scores from areas such as comprehension, vocabulary and
Average IQ score distri but ion by population
reasoning to give an overall IQ. These batteries are used to diagnose, treat
c 0
·;::;
or counsel children and adults who need personal or academic assistance. Ability testing is governed by detailed
10
:J
a. 0 a.
0 Q)
ethical standards and professionally administered tests must meet strict criteria including lack of cultural bias
01
2c
Q)
u ._ Q)
20%
0..
5%
70
5%
80
90
100 IQ score
110
120
130
and periodic updating. In fact, IQ tests are the most technically sophisticated of all psychological tests and undergo the most extensive quality checks before publication. 2 July 20111 NewScientist I iii
OLDERAND WISER The brain is a physical organ and no less subject than any other to ageing. illness and injury. The normal developmental trajectory is that aptitude at learning and reasoning- mental horsepower - increases quickly in youth. peaks in early adulthood, and then declines slowly thereafter and drops precipitously before death. The good news is that some important abilities resist the downturn. Some IQ researchers distinguish between tests of fluid intelligence (gF) and crystallised intelligence (gC). The first assess on -the-spot learning, reasoning and problem solving; the second assess the crystallised fruits of our previous intellectual endeavours, such as vocabulary in one's native language and broad cultural knowledge. During youth gF and gC rise in tandem, but they follow different trajectories thereafter. All gF abilities decline together, perhaps because the brain's processing speed slows down with age. However, most people's gC abilities remain near their personal peak into old age because they reside in the neural connections that gF has laid down over a lifetime of learning and practice. Of course, age-related memory loss will affect an individual's ability to recall, but exactly how this affects intelligence is not yet known. This has practical implications. On the positive side, robust levels of gC buffer the effects of declining gF. Older workers are generally less able to solve novel problems, but they can often compensate by calling
upon their larger stores of experience. knowledge and hard-won wisdom. But gC can also disguise declines in gF, with potentially hazardous results. For example. health problems in later life can present new cognitive challenges, such as complex treatments and medication regimes, which individuals with ample gC may appear to understand when actually they cannot cope. There are ways of slowing or reversing losses in cognitive function. The most effective discovered so far is physical exercise, which protects the brain by protecting the body's cardiovascular health. Mental exercise, often called brain training, is widely promoted, but it boosts only the particular skill that is practised its narrow impact mirroring that of educational interventions at other ages. Various drugs are being investigated for their value in staving off normal cognitive decline, but for now preventive maintenance is still the best bet- avoid smoking, drinking to excess, head injuries and the like.
Somatosensory
Word formation Auditory
·~ Behaviour, emotions, motivation
Language, comprehension
O~ct
naming
iv I New Scientist 12 July 2011
Vision
Volume of the cortex, the brain's grey matter, correlates with IQ
Overall size of the brain, relative to the body, correlates with IQ
Intelligence requires integration of sensory and other information
Visual processing
Learning and experience can increase the size of specific brain areas
High IQ is associated with faster mental processing speed
Volume of tissue linking the brain's hemispheres correlate s with IQ
WHAT MAKES SOMEONE SMART? Intelligence tests are calibrated so that, at each age, the IQ average score is 100 and 90 per cent of individuals score between IQ 75 and 125. The typical IQ difference between strangers is 17 points and it is 12 between full siblings. Everybody accepts that intelligence varies. But what makes some people smarter than others? How do nature and nurture interact to create that variation as we develop? Are differences in g set at birth, or can we increase someone's intelligence by nurturing them in the right environment?
NATURE AND NURTURE "Intriguingly, the heritability of intelligence is less than 30 per cent before children start school, rising to 80 per cent among adults"
Each of us is the embodiment of our genes and the environment working together from conception to death. To understand how these two forces interact
to reinforce their cognitive abilities. Given that an individual's ability to exploit a given environment
to generate differences in intelligence, behavioural geneticists compare twins, adoptees and other family members. The most compelling research comes
is influenced by their genetic endowment, and given that "better"
from identical twins adopted into different homesindividuals with identical genes but different environments- and non-kin adopted into the same
family environments tend not to produce overall increases in IQ, it is not surprising that attempts to raise low
home- unrelated individuals sharing the same environment. These and other studies show that IQ similarity most closely lines up with genetic similarity.
IQs by enriching poor school or home environments tend to disappoint. Narrow abilities can be trained up but g apparently cannot. This makes
More intriguingly, the studies also reveal that the heritability of intelligence- the percentage of its variation in a particular population that can be
sense if g is an overall property of the brain. That does not mean intensive early educational interventions lack
attributed to its variation in genes- steadily increases with age. Heritability is less than 30 per cent before children start school, rising to 80 per cent among
positive effects: among other things they may reduce rates of teenage pregnancy, delinquency and school
western adults. In fact. by adolescence, separated identical twins answer IQ tests almost as if they were the same person and adoptees in the same household
dropout. Besides, even if we cannot boost low intelligence into the average range, we do know how to
as if they were strangers. The surprising conclusion is that most family environments are equally effective
help all children learn more than they currently do and achieve more with
for nurturing intelligence - the IQ of an adult will be the same almost regardless of where he or she grew up, unless the environment is particularly inhumane. Why does the shared environment's power to
the intelligence they have.
Identical twins are a natural laboratory in which to study how intelligence develops
modify IQ variation wane and genetic influences increase as children gain independence? Studies on the nature of nurture offer a clue. All children enter the world as active shapers of their own environment. Parents and teachers experience this first-hand as their charges frustrate attempts to be shaped in particular ways. And increasing independence gives young people ever more opportunities to choose the cognitive complexity of the environments they seek out. The genetically brighter an individual, the more cognitively demanding the tasks and situations they tend to choose, and the more opportunities they have
2 July 20111 NewScientist I v
REALISING YOUR ASSETS IQ tests are designed to measure an individual's maximum cognitive ability but in everyday life we rarely perform at our best. Too often we arrive at work sleep-deprived, stressed, distracted, hungry, sick, addled by medicine or hung-over- all of which reduce cognitive acuity. This is compounded by the fact that many employers fail to recognise that mental performance varies over a day or week. Organisations squander their members' cognitive assets when they pace tasks poorly or flout normal sleep cycles, such as when schools start too early for the typical student, or when shift-workers have to put up with constantly changing schedules. What's more, to fully realise their abilities, individuals of different intelligence levels often require different kinds of support. Educational and military psychologists have shown that people of below-average intelligence learn best when given
cause cumulative cognitive damage, accelerating the effects of ageing and
Brain training games can only improve
concrete, step-by-step, hands-on instruction and lots of practice, whereas individuals of above-
increasing the risk of dementia. With vaccinations and care, most such
particularskills but not overall intelligence
average intelligence learn best when allowed to structure their own learning. One-size-fits-all instruction stunts the learning of both types of
assaults are preventable. We can also reduce exposure to human-made hazards thatdamagethe brain, such as pesticides, lead, radiation and
individuals. Schools can get far more out of pupils by educating them to their personal potential and employers can boost the achievements of their staff with well-targeted assistance such as mentoring,
exposure to drugs in the womb. The best way to get the most from our
supervision and training. Brainpower also needs protecting and nurturing.
native intelligence right into old age is to maintain good health of both body and mind. Healthy body, healthy mind
Chronic illness, alcohol abuse and head injuries
is a cliche because it's true.
"As modern life becomes ever more complex, technological upgrades can feel like brain downgrades"
vi I NewScientist 12 July 2011
SIMPLIFY YOUR WORLD Modern life is becoming ever more complex. When parents have to turn to their children to operate the latest electronic gadget, technological
throughout the day, which in turn requires planning for contingencies, recognising when blood sugar is veering
upgrades can feel like brain downgrades. The rising complexity of daily life can be a source of humour, embarrassment and inconvenience but given that
too high or low, knowing how to regain control and conceptualising the imperceptible but cumulative damage
the ability to deal with cognitive complexity is the essence of intelligence, this complexity can also be detrimental to personal well -being. One largely
caused by failing to maintain control. There is no set recipe for people with diabetes to follow - their bodies and
overlooked way we can achieve more with the intelligence we have is to recognise this and t ry to reduce needless complexity in everyday life.
circumstances differ. Moreover, they get little training, virtually no supervision and no days off. Effectively managing
The potentially harmful effects of cognitive overload are particularly clear in the field of
your diabetes is a cognitively complex job and poor performance has serious
healthcare. High rates of non-adherence to treatments are the bane of medical providers, and these increase when treatment plans are
consequences, including emergency room visits, lost limbs or eyesight, and even death. The lower the diabetic
more complex and patients less intelligent. Given the complexity of self-care regimes, it is hardly surprising that some people make dangerous errors
person's IQ, the greater the risks. Attempts to improve health outcomes in situations like this often focus on
or fail to comply. The effective management of diabetes, for example, requires a person to keep blood sugar levels within a healthy range, which
changing the behaviour of patients, but an equally effective approach might be to lower unnecessary cognitive hurdles
means coordinating diet, exercise and medication
to successful prevention, treatment and
BOOSTING BRAIN POWER Who wouldn't like to be more intelligent? If someone invented a safe and effective smart drug that could boost g by 20 points it would surely sell faster than Viagra. Unfortunately, everything we have learned about intelligence indicates that this is highly unlikely. If increasing intelligence is not an option, can you do more with what you have, by finding effective ways to work smarter, perhaps?
COGNITIVE ENHANCEMENT Brain implants, transplants and downloads may be far in the f uture, but other forms of cognitive
t iny electrical current. Each claims to improve one or more specific abilities
enhancement have a long history. For centuries people have used brain-boosting drugs. Caffeine and nicotine, for example, both increase alertness for
such as concentration, visual perception or memory, but the jury is still out on whether these
short periods. Today there are more choices than ever. One recent survey of US universities found that as many as 25 per cent of students routinely take Ritalin
improvements have real-world value. Perhaps the most universally accessible brain toner is one of the
or Adderall to boost memory and concentration- both drugs are actually designed to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Another favourite is modafinil.
most ancient- meditation. Growing evidence suggests that training in mindfulness meditation improves not
licensed to treat narcolepsy and various sleep disorders, but which can also reduce fatigue and maintain alertness in healthy individuals burning
just psychological well-being but also produces measurable improvements in a range of cognitive areas, including
the midnight oil. There are dozens more drugs in the pipeline with t he potential for cognitive enhancement- some act on the same nicotinic
attention and memory, probably by reducing susceptibility to stress and distraction.
receptors as cigarettes; others are being developed for the express purpose of augmenting memory. Even if they are effective, however, such drugs do
Superfoods may make
not increase intelligence, they only enhance certain aspects of cognition such as memory or alertness. And there may be unknown risks associated with them,
you healthier but they won't increase your IQ
particularly those that have been developed for other purposes and have had few trials on healthy people. However much we would like to boost our brainpower, many of us are not prepared to take these risks. That might help explain the rise in recent years
"'
~ of so-called superfoods as a natural solution to
~ cognitive enhancement. Unfortunately, while eat ing
"'
~ blueberries, salmon, avocados, and dark chocolate a: ~ is obviously safer, it may not be as effective as many ~ people hope. If such "brain foods" work at all, it is ::> ~ probably primarily by promoting general health when "' consumed as part of a wholesome, balanced diet. ~ "'~ In our desire to be cleverer we are constantly on 0 5 the look-out for new cognitive enhancers. They range "' from the sublime, such as learning to play a musical ~ ~::.> instrument, to the impractical, such as transcranial ~ direct current stimulation, which involves placing J: l;l electrodes on the scalp to zap the brain with a ~
Zj uly 20111 NewScientist I vii
Linda S. Gottfredson Linda S. Gottfredson is a professor of education at the University of Delaware in Newark. She focuses on the socia I implications of intelligence, including how cultural institutions are shaped by the wide variation in human cognitive capability that is characteristic of a11 groups. She is also interested in the evolution of human intelligence and especially the idea that it may have been driven by a need to overcome novel hazards associated with innovation
NEXT NSTANT EXPERT Oavid Sloan VVilson
GROUP
SELECTION 6August
ARE WE GETTING SMARTER? Over the past century, each successive generation has answered more IQ test items correctly than the last the rise being equivalent to around 3 1Q points per decade in developed nations. This is dubbed the "Fiynn effect" after the political scientist james Flynn, who most thoroughly documented it. Are humans getting smarter, and if so, why? One possible explanation is that today's world supports or demands higher levels of intelligence. Flynn himself suggests that intelligence has risen in part because we view life more analytically, through "scientific spectacles". However, the idea that cultural environments have potent and widespread effects on how smart we are does not square with what we know about the high heritability of intelligence. Environmental variation contributes relatively little to the IQ differences in a birth cohort as its members mature over the decades. How, then, cou ld it create such big IQ differences across successive birth cohorts living in the same era? Another theory puts rising IQ down to physiological changes. In the past century human height has been increasing in tandem with IQ throughout the developed world. Better public health measures have reduced the need for our immune systems to consume resources to combat infectious disease, leaving us able to spend more on growth- and larger, smarter brains may be just one consequence. Not only that as more people travelled and married outside their local group, populations may have benefited genetically from hybrid vigour. viii I NewScientist I 2 July 2011
Inbreeding is known to lower intelligence, and outbreeding can raise it. lt is also possible that the Flynn effect does not in fact reflect a rise in general intelligence, or g. After all, can the average IQ of adults at the end of the second world war really have been 20 points less than today? That would put them in the bottom 10 per cent of intelligence by current standards, making t hem legally ineligible to serve in the US military on grounds of poor trainability. lt defies belief. Instead of an overall increase in g, perhaps just certain biologically rooted cognitive abilities are increasing. An IQ test comprises a series of subtests, and it turns out that scores in some of these have increased a lot - including our ability to identify similarities between common objects - whereas others have not increased at all- such as scores in the vocabulary and arithmetic subtests. That would imply changes in specific brain regions rather than the whole brain. The inter-generational rise in IQ test scores is a brain-twister for researchers trying to figure out what it means. Nevertheless, it does not undermine the use of IQ tests within generations. Current IQtests are not intended to give an absolute measure of intelligence akin to grams and kilograms, but only to rate an individual's intellectual capacity relative to others born in the same year - no matter what the cohort, the mean score is always set at 100. As for the variation in g that IQ tests measure, it seems as wide and as consequential as ever.
RECOMMENDED READING Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction by lan Deary (Oxford University Press, 2001) The Genetic and Environmental Origins of Learning Abilities and Disabilities in the Early School Years by Yul ia Kovas and others (Biackwell, 2007) The g Foetor: The Science of Mental Ability by Arthur jensen (Praeger, 1998) Correcting Fallacies about Educational and Psychological Testing edited by Richard Phelps {American Psychological Association, 2009) Intelligence, vol24{1) {special issue called Intelligence and Social Policy) Intelligence, vol 37(2) {special issue called Intelligence and the Brain) journal of Personality and Social Psychology. vol86, p 96 {the Special Section on Cognitive Abilities) Cover image joe McNally/Getty
ELCOME to Procyon B, a nearby star that's light years away from the sun, and not only in distance terms. Unlike the healthy star we circle, Procyon B is dim and dying. Having thrown off its outer layers, it is puny compared with the sun. And it is so dense that were you able to scoop up a spoonful of its material, it would weighs tonnes. So unlike our sun is Procyon B, in fact, that those seeking extraterrestrial life have long overlooked the star's potential. But we may have been too hasty, according to Eric Agol, an astronomer at the University ~:: of Washington in Seattle. Though dim and ~ diminutive, Procyon Band other white dwarf
stars like it could host planets sporting mild temperatures, oceans and living critters. With billions of white dwarfs in our galaxy alone, Agol's work opens up a new frontier in the search for intelligent life. What's more, even small telescopes could search the vicinity of such dying stars for potentially life-bearing worlds. "This is something an amateur astronomer could do," says Ago!. So far, the search for alien life has focused on planets orbiting stars similar in size, temperature and brightness to the sun. That makes sense: the universe's one known life-bearing planet orbits such a star. Since zoog, NASA's Kepler spacecraft has been > 2july2011 1NewScientist 137
scrutinising sun-like stars in its quest for Earth's twin. Among the 1235 candidate planets Kepler has found, 54 orbit their stars at just the right distance for water to exist in liquid form. Of those, only s are similar in size to the Earth, suggesting that they are rocky worlds rather than gas or ice giants, and Agol began to wonder if there was an easier way to detect small, Earth-sized planets. Dying stars hardly evoke visions oflife. White dwarfs are what most stars, including the sun one day, become after they run out of nuclear fuel. They owe their glow to leftover heat. The youngest are so hot they shine blue. As they cool, they turn white, then yellow and orange, and there they linger at a temperature similar to the sun's. The sun has been able to nurture terrestrial life because it has been stable for billions of years. A cool white dwarf is just as stable. So if any putative planets huddle close, why can't they develop life the way Earth d id? "My first thought was, 'that's crazy'," says Scott Gaudi, an astronomer at Ohio State University in Columbus. "Then the more I thought about it, the more sense it made."
A planet eclipsing a white dwarf will look like a solar eclipse
befall Mercury and possibly Venus and Earth in about 7 billion years. Within another billion years the red giant sheds its outer layers of gas to form a glowing planetary nebula. The exposed hot, dense core is a white dwarf. It would seem impossible for any close-in planet to survive such fireworks, but astronomers were stunned 20 years ago to discover planets around a different type of dead star known as a pulsar. Pulsars have gone through much greater drama than any white Habitable huddle dwarf: they are born in supernova explosions. One reason it seems so crazy is the way white The planets probably condense from a disc of dwarfs are born. After a sun-like star has gas and dust that encircles the pulsar after it burned the hydrogen fuel at its core, it has tom a companion star to shreds. balloons into a monstrous red giant more than Other clues to the possible origins of dead100 times wider than the sun. It engulfs and star planets come from the haul of planets already found around sun-like stars. Many of destroys any nearby planets, a fate that will
Life cycle of the sun Our sun and stars of similar mass go t hrough t he same stages as they age
38 I NewScientist IZJuly 2011
these stars have Jupiter-sized planets orbiting close by, but these could only have formed far from the star where there is sufficient ice and rubble. Their near orbits suggest that they must have migrated or been kicked in somehow from further out. Perhaps the same processes work around a white dwarf, shepherding frigid planets towards the warmth of their dim sun. Or planets might form anew after the white dwarf has formed if an orbiting disc of gas and dust exists. Despite their dramatic birth, white dwarfs usually exist in peace, just cooling off. Agol's calculations show that there is a period of billions of years when a planet in the right orbit around a cool white dwarf could be habitable (TheAstrophysica/Journal Letters, vol731, p L31). Because cool white dwarfs are only about a
ten-thousandth as bright as the sun, to stay warm a planet must huddle at one-hundredth of the distance between the Earth and the sun. Any habitable planets would complete their orbits every 4 to 32 hours, says Agol. If it were any shorter, the planet would be so close th at the pull of t he star's gravity would tear it ap art. At longer periods, the planet is so far out th at it would freeze. No one has ever fou nd a planet around a white dwarf. Yet astronomers are enth u siastic about Agol's idea because the diminut ive size of white dwarfs mean such planet s should be easy to find. When an Earth-sized planet passes in front of a star as large as the sun, it blocks so little of its light that only an expensive mission, such as Kepler, can detect the eclipse. But white dwarfs are as small as Earth, so a passing planet may well block all the star's light from reaching us. The planet's presence would look like a total solar eclip se every day, throu gh any b ackyard telescope that could see the white dwarf. "There are enough amateu rs out th ere with telescop es t hat could be p erfect for this sort of project," says Ago!. With billions of white dwarfs in the Milky Way, there are plenty of places to look. The n earest one, Sirius B, is probably too hot to have h abitable planets and Procyon B, 11.4 light years away, is t oo close to a bright star for most amateur telescopes to detect it. Bu t other white dwarfs fit the bill: Van Maanen's star is just 14 light years from Earth and is bright enough for a small telescope to observe. Wh ite dwarfs further away are dimmer and that means larger telescopes are needed. Agol says telescopes with mirrors b etween h alf-a-metre and a metre across are ideal. That's too big for most amateurs to have at home, but many keen star-gazers belong to ast ronomy clubs with access to such telescopes.
"Even amateur astronomers could search these dying stars for life-bearing worlds"
ALIENS OF THE TWILIGHT ZONE Life on a planet orbiting a tiny white dwarf would be quite different from life on Earth. Since any life-bearing planet in a white-dwarf system would orbit close to its star, the gravitational forces would be immense. They would cause the planet to rotate at the same rate it orbits the star;· says astronomer Eric Ago I at the University of Washington in Seattle. That means the same side of the planet would always face the star: the sun would never set on the hot. day side, whereas the night side would be freezing and forever in darkness. The star~ pull would also keep the planet upright on its axis and its orbit circular, so there would be no seasons. There would be no moon because the sta~ gravity would have torn any satellites away. A year would last only about as long
Daily eclipses The more people who look, the better. Even if close-in white-dwarf planets abound, only about 1 in 100 is going to be situ ated so that it can stop starlight from reaching Earth. Agol therefore wants to search thousands of white dwarfs. "I've thought about trying to coordinate amateur astronomers around the world," h e says. Even so, it could be a long slog. With the nearest and brightest white dwarfs scattered across the sky, a single telescope u sually m on itors just one at a time. Still, John Tonry, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, hopes to bu ild an array of eight 25-centimetre telescopes called Atlas that w ill
as Earth~ day, so yout'.l need some other unit to reckon lengthy periods of time. Not everything would differ from Earth, though. The white dwarf sun would look much like our own, even down to its colour. And though a white dwarf is about one-hundredth the size of our sun, it would appear the same size as ours in the sky because it would be 100 times closer. If the air had the same composition as Earth~ air, then the sky would look blue,
just like our skies," says Ago I. But if you lived on the day-night boundary, yout'.l see
scan th e entire visible sky twice a n ight, principally to give early warning of an asteroid strike. "Atlas will get a look at 10,000 or 2o ,oo o white dwarfs every night," h e says. In the best possible scenario, in which every white dwarf has a planet, Atlas should start seeing eclipses within a week or two. Tonry says the cost of his proposed project is relatively modest, at $3 million. Far m ore am bitious and expensive is the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, an 8-metre telescope to be built in Chile later in the decade. Designed to observe most of the sky, it will also yield evidence of close-in white-dwarf planets, if th ey exist. However they are fou nd, planet-indu ced eclipses of white dwarfs will be brief, lasting just a couple of minutes. Confirming the presen ce of a planet w ill be easy because it goes around its star in a m atter of hours. In con trast, eclipsing planets like Earth, with one-year periods, take m u ch longer to confirm. If Agol is right, we have neglected a type of star that may support life through out the galaxy. And we m ay not be alone in our folly. Any extraterrestrial astronomers living on a white dwarf planet looking for signs of life in t he universe are likely to be examining other white dwarfs. By doing so, they'll be missing the sun and the Earth . But who can blame them ? After all, detecting little planets around big stars like the sun is hard. It's a lot easier to catch such a world orbiting a white dwarf. •
a permanent sunset." For aliens living in the twilight zone, that would mean a perpetually red sun.
Ken Croswell is an astronomer in Berkeley, California. and the author of The Livesof Stors (Boyds Mills Press. 2009) 2 July 20111 NewScientist 139
Corvids are known as the "feathered apes" for their intelligence
40 I NewScientist I ZJuly 2011
Can a crow t hink? How about a fru it fly? Emma Young explores the mental lives of animals
TFIRST, the New Caledonian crow simply watches the menacing presence suspiciously, hopping around in circles to get the best possible view. Eventually, overcome by curiosity, it picks up a twig that it would normally use to forage for food and pokes the threatening object, before jumping back in apprehension. When the thing fails to respond - being a rubber spider- the crow gains confidence and returns to lift it this way and that, peeking at the underbelly. The behaviour, recorded in a study led by Joanna Wimpenny, in Alex Kacelnik's lab at the University of Oxford, certainly looks smart. You or I might well behave in a similar way were we to come across something strange and potentially dangerous. But what's really going on behind those beady eyes? A deliberate thought process or mere animal instinct? The question of whether other animals can think has troubled some of the greatest minds throughout the ages. Aristotle and Rene Descartes believed that animal behaviour is governed purely by reflexes, while Charles Darwin and the 19th-century psychologist William James argued that animals might have complicated ment al lives. We are now closer than ever to settling this debate. Taking into account a wealth of reports of ingenious animal behaviours, g including those of the New Caledonian .... ~ crows, many biologists have come to believe that certain creatures really do have 3 rudimentary thoughts. Meanwhile, the latest §1- brain-imaging experiments are helping us ~ understand what kind of anatomy might be v> ~ necessary for a thinking brain. Although it's ~ unlikely that their mental lives are quite as u ~ complex as ours, there's much more going
g <(
on in their heads than you might think. Despite its long history, the question of whether animals think used to be something of a taboo subject. Opinions began to change in the 1970s, when American zoologist Donald Griffin started to tackle the problem. He was one of the first people to discover echolocation in bats, and behaviours such as beavers' ability to cut pieces of wood to precisely fit particular holes in their dams, and vervet monkeys' capacity for using their calls to mislead others in the troop led him to suggest that animals could think. Other zoologists, sceptical of what were mostly subjective and possibly anthropomorphised observations, were outraged. "Griffin came out with what I think was a crazy book, in which he said that all animals are conscious and every time any animal did anything with any ingenuity, as primitive as a firefly glowing in the dark, that proved it was conscious," says Clive Wynne, who studies canine cognition and behaviour at the University of Florida, Gainesville. But Griffin's work nevertheless invigorated the debate, Wynne says, and research is now more objective and systematic. Very few today would agree with Griffin's broad claims. More popular is the idea that the mental experiences of other animals lie on a kind of spectrum, ranging from a primitive kind of awareness to the rich and complex stream of thoughts in the human mind.
"Corvids might even be able to second-guess another bird's behaviour and monitor its menta I st ate"
The fruit fly turns out to be the perfect animal in which to explore one end of this spectrum. Over the last few years, Bruno van Swinderen of the Queensland Brain Institute in St Lucia, Australia, has helped to show that these insects have an essential prerequisite for awareness: rather than responding randomly to everything around them, they can select what they pay attention to based on their memories. For example, the flies are more likely to explore new objects added to their environment than things that have been around for a while. And last year, van Swinderen's team showed that reducing the fruit fly's ability to form memories can damage their capacity to attend to novelty, so that the insects respond more randomly to their surroundings (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol30, p 1003).
Planning for the future Flexible attention probably emerges even in the simplest brains, meaning many creatures, including fish, amphibians and reptiles, might also have this kind of awareness. Few would claim, though, that this rudimentary behaviour constitutes a thought process. So which animals, if any, show signs of the more advanced mental life that we humans experience? The best clues so far come from animals that exhibit particularly complex forms of behaviour. An ability to plan for the future has been one important strand of evidence, for instance. Until recently, this trait was believed to be uniquely human, but in the late 1990s, Nicky Clayton at the University of Cambridge found that scrub jays can use specific memories of past events to forge > 2 July 20111 NewScientist 141
plans for times ahead. In 2006, researchers at Germany, found that in a staged food hunt, the University of Edinburgh, UK, found that chimps will try to guess where their this ability extended to hummingbirds. They competitors might have looked first, so that can remember the location of certain flowers they can search the less obvious locations and how recently they had visited them and (Proceedings ofthe National Academy of then use this information to guide future Sciences, vol1o8, p 3077). Whales, bears and behaviour. Work published since then suggests dogs haven't yet proved their abilities in this that primates, rats and octopuses show some kind of task, but they nevertheless display aptitude for forward planning. some signs of empathy that suggest they too The real test, however, is whether the might have a relatively advanced mental life behaviour is flexible . If not, the act might just (see "You've got me feeling emotions", below). be an evolved instinct, however complex it appears to be. The corvid family, which Making a "pass" includes crows, ravens and jays, does seem to show this on-the-fly ingenuity. The Kacelnik Clever as these behaviours are, they may lab's New Caledonian crows, for instance, nevertheless lack one important characteristic showed off their ability to use an old tool for of human thought, called "metacognition". This is the ability to monitor and control a new job, when they probed the threatening rubber spider with their foraging twigs. The memories and perceptions, allowing us team published their work earlier this year to think that, "I know that I know this" or "I'm not sure that I'm right", or to feel (Animal Cognition, vol14, p 459). Then there's that someone's name is on the tip of your the case ofBetty, a particularly intelligent crow who would bend a piece of wire on a twig tongue. According to David Smith of the State University of New York, Buffalo, its in order to hook some food out of a test tube at the other side of the room. It is amazing that importance to human thought is comparable she could remember the food in the tube as to that oflanguage and tool use. Evidence she flew over to the branch, and then use the for metacognition in other animals would memory to solve a problem that wasn't therefore strike a blow for the existence of to take the "all-or-nothing" experiments. immediately in her field of view, says David the animal mind. This suggested that when given the opportunity, Smith began exploring the subject with they were fully ea pable of assessing their Edelman ofThe Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California. "That, to me, is strongly a flurry of papers in the early 20oos. For confidence in the task, providing compelling suggestive of a conscious process at work." example, in one experiment, he presented evidence for monkey metacognition. Corvids might even be able to second-guess a group ofmacaques with an image. After Further research suggests they are part another bird's behaviour. For example, of a select set with this ability (Trends in a short delay, the monkeys had to try and experiments by Bernd Heinrich at the select the image from a group of four. The Cognitive Sciences, vol 13, p 389). Chimps, like University of Vermont and Thomas Bugnyar prize was a tasty peanut, but if they got it macaques, have demonstrated metacognition at the University of Vienna, Austria, found wrong, they won nothing. In one stream of time and again, but capuchin monkeys, that ravens will take steps to protect a secret experiments, however, the monkeys could although intelligent in other areas, seem food cache from other ravens that might have forfeit the chance to win the peanut, in return to fall at this hurdle. The results for dolphins seen them hiding it, but were unconcerned for a guaranteed prize of a less desirable pellet aren't clear-cut, though it's pretty certain that about ravens stuck behind an obstacle that creatures like the humble pigeon just can't of processed monkey food. Smith suspected would have blocked their view (Proceedings of that the monkeys would take this option to step up to the challenge. the Royal Society B, vol272, p 1641). "The work "pass" if they weren't sure of the answer. Finding out whether other intelligent certainly suggests that these birds have the He was right. Monkeys given the chance species like dolphins, and perhaps crows, have capacity to monitor both the experiences and to pass performed much better on the tests metacognition is crucial to our understanding perceived mental states of others," says they did choose to take than those made of the mind, says Smith. We need to know Edelman. In other words, they have a basic "theory of mind", which should not be possible without some kind of thought process. Few other creatures are thought to have While some researchers University of Colorado, Boulder, and swam slowly, but his sister this ability, but not surprisingly primates are among this elite. If chimpanzees are stealing interested in probing animal caught salmon for him to eat, thinks there are clear signs that food, for example, they will be sure to be minds are concentrating on tests animals can experience empathy, and her support was crucial for of intellect. others are looking for spite, grief, gratitude, love and his survival. Such evidence, he extra quiet if another member of the group is within earshot. More impressively still, they evidence of an emotional life, even awe. He cites, for example, thi nks, points to a sophisticated type of consciousness in a range which many think is an important a story of two orphaned grizzly seem to be able to guess how another might of animals, including dogs, have acted in the past. Earlier this year, constituent of consciousness. bear cubs in Alaska. The male Marc Bekoff, a biologist at the elephants and humpback whales. had been wounded, and limped Michael Tomasello at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig,
You've got me feeling emotions
421 NewScientist I2July 2011
"If chimps are stealing food, they will be sure to be extra quiet if one of their group is within earshot"
Though clever, chimps are unable to grasp abstract concepts
whether metacognition developed only once, in the line of Old World primates that leads to apes and humans." Or did metacognition develop repeatedly and convergently, as the last frost that settles on all the highest peaks of cognitive sophistication in dolphins, crows, apes and people?" If that turned out to be the case, it would shake up our understanding of the evolution of the primate brain, he says. With such a broad array of complex behaviours, many evolutionary biologists have conceded that at least some species have the rudiments of thought. Not everyone is convinced that we humans should step down from our pedestal just yet, however. Daniel Povinelli oft he Cognitive Evolution Group at the University ofLouisiana, Lafayette, for example, agrees that some animals are capable of thought, but he believes we are unique in our "higher" level of reasoning that allows us to grasp abstract ideas. Chimps, for example, just don't get abstract physical concepts, like weight, gravity and the transfer offorce. Place a banana near a chimp's cage and provide them with a few potential tools to reach their snack, and they're just as likely to try something floppy as they are to reach for a rigid rod. He concludes that chimps can reason about things that are directly perceivable, but only humans have a higher level of thought that doesn't solely rely on sensory input, allowing us to form
more abstract concepts, like that of gravity or force. He also doubt s that chimps have a theory of mind. "Message from Earth to comparative psychology," he says, "humans are different." Wynne takes a more negative view but admits that he is in the minority. "The centre of gravity in the field is with people who would say that certain kinds of complex behaviour indicate consciousness in at least some animals," he says. "But then there are the miserable sods like me, who don't think that really any animals show consciousness, because we set the bar higher." Like Descartes, Wynne has come to the conclusion that language is essential for thought. "That's because you can show me an ingenious behaviour- that does not involve language - and I conceive of doing it without being aware that I was doing it. The only behaviours that I cannot conceive of doing unconsciously are ones that involve using language." Think of the complex actions that humans do all the time and that don't require consciousness, he says. We can operate a complex piece of machinery -like a car, for example - without thinking about it. The problem, says van Swinderen, is that behavioural studies can only go so far in addressing this problem. "You could show an animal like a fly doing something like putting on a hat and wearing clothes, and
still some people would say it's just a series of reflexes," he says. For this reason, some researchers are calling for new approaches that might settle the argument once and for all. Brain imaging provides some of the most promising possibilities. Aaron Schurger ofPrinceton University and colleagues, for example, have used functional MRI to study signatures of consciousness in the human brain. They have found that there is a similar pattern of neural activity each time we become conscious of the same picture of a house or a face, but not if we process information from the image unconsciously (Science, vol327, p 97). Such work suggests that conscious thought does not depend on any uniquely human region of the brain, meaning there's no anatomical reason that it should be exclusive to people. Other neuroscientific work has, however, revealed some important prerequisites for consciousness that might be present in some, but not all, animals. Neural connections that allow the thalamus to relay information from the senses to the cortex, for example, seem to be vital for conscious awareness. Other mammals also have such a pathway, so "at the very least they have the substrates in place for consciousness", Edelman argues. "With recent advances in avian functional neuroanatomy, we can probably say the same about birds." This would seem to fit with the conclusions of the behavioural studies. If we're on the hunt for evidence of conscious thought in other animals- whether vertebrates like reptiles and amphibians or invertebrates like the octopus and squid- it makes sense to look for analogues to the thalamus and cortex in those species as well, he says. Even if these studies prove to be successful, some people will nevertheless take a lot of convincing. Wynne, for one, maintains that the debate is still best left for late night drinks, as he thinks no data will ever answer the question. But Edelman is optimistic that looking for animal equivalents of the thalamus and cortex will settle the arguments. "As far as I'm concerned, this could be the way out of centuries of debate." • Emma Young is a writer based in Sydney, Aust ralia Zjuly 20111 NewScientist 143
CULTURELAB
The dramatic life of Doctor Dee David Robson gets the story behind a new opera about the 16th-century mathematician DrDee
....
Director Rufus Norris works to bring Damon AI barn's opera to life
Palace Theatre, Manchester International Festival, until9 July JOHN DEE, the 16th-century mathematician and occultist at the centre of Queen Elizabeth I's court, has inspired some of the world's greatest minds. Shakespeare evoked him as the enigmatic conjuror Prospero in The Tempest, while Christopher Marlowe created the powerhungry Doctor Faustus, who sold his soul to the devil for greater knowledge. "Those are rather fantastical fictions," says Rufus Norris, who is directing a new opera about Dee written by Damon AI barn. "But sometimes the truth is far more interesting." The opera, Dr Dee, which premieres at the Manchester International Festival in the UK this week, was conceived when festival organisers approached graphic novelist Alan Moo re who created Vfor Vendetta and From Hell - to work on a new Copernicus's model of the project about the life of an universe. He also developed obscure but important figure mathematical techniques to from English history. Moo re chose help sailors navigate by the stars, Dee as his subject, and Albarn, meaning that boats could venture best known as the lead singer and out on new routes away from the coast - a key development in songwriter of the bands Blur and Gorillaz, came on board to write exploring the New World and the music. Moo re later left "for reasons that we're not quite sure "Oee's magpie curiosity of", says Norris, but the seeds of was ultimately his the idea had been sown. downfall, as he turned to the occult in the 1580s" Albarn and Norris could hardly have had a richer source ultimately building England's of inspiration for their opera. Dee's early life was marked by empire. And, like other intellectual successes that earned intellectuals of his era, after the him respect in Elizabeth's court. emergence of the supernova in He popularised Euclidean the constellation Cassiopeia in geometry in academic circles 1572, Dee likely contemplated the universe as a never-ending and was an early supporter of 44 1NewScientist 12 July 2011
1
expanse of space and stars, says his biographer Benjamin Woolley. Dee's magpie curiosity was ultimately his downfall, however. Frustrated by the limits of his knowledge, in the 1580s he turned to the occult under the guidance of the medium Edward Kelley. Yet Kelley - a charismatic and manipulative individual - seems to have had an ulterior motive. "He took a fancy to Dee's wife," says Woolley. While the group was in Bohemia, Kelley persuaded Dee that the angel Uriel had ordered them to share their wives. It was a massive turning point in Dee's life. His relationship with Kelley collapsed, and he returned home to find his famous library ransacked by rivals. Thanks to his
forays into mysticism, he also received an icy reception at the court that had once adored him. Dee eventually died in poverty. So how do you dramatise such a life? Norris and Albarn have taken an unusual approach. Though he will sometimes sing as Dee, Albarn will play himself. 'Tm singing but I'm not an actor I'm not wearing a ruff and tights," he says. The opera will open with Albarn by himself, before cutting to Dee's deathbed to explore the incidents and characters that shaped his life. Albarn's music will be performed with a mixture of traditional Elizabethan instruments and west African drumming by Nigerian composer anddrummer Tony Alien. "The sounds that travelled from Africa into Europe at that time were really important," says Albarn. "That's been somewhat passed over in modern history." The show also features 23 members of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. "It's a big sound." The ensemble hopes to explore the resonances between the England of today and Dee's nation at the cusp of its golden age. "Dee was a huge figure in the reign of Elizabeth I, and here we are at the end of another Elizabeth's reign, her twilight years - and the empire has sort of evaporated," says Albarn. "I think there's a real connection between these two moments." The result would have perhaps found favour with Dee, says Woolley. "It's just the kind of weird and wonderful experiment that he would have loved." •
For more books and arts coverage and to add your comments, visit newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab
Statistical thriller Who'd have thought that Bayes's theorem could be turned into such a gripping story?
1
The Theory That Would Not Die by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, Yale University Press. £18.99/$27.50
Reviewed by David Robson
FEW single ideas can boast such an impressive 'Cl resume. What ... " " -· C!> """lad -· ...WO. else could have ~lllmt• possibly cracked tfftlilllnol-~ ., the Enigma code in ..__ _ ____, the second world war, predicted John F. Kennedy's close-run win in the tg6o US presidential election, and landed a winning blow against the nefarious antics of the tobacco industry? The secret to these successes is a humble little theorem called Bayes's rule that allows you to assess the probability of one event from observations of an associated event. On election night, for example, you might use an early outcome from one US state to help predict the winner in states that have not yet announced their result. This simple rule has experienced
- -' -"''
The US applied Bayes's rule to the task of tracking Soviet submarines
the second world war, and the US navy's later use of the technique to track Soviet submarines. Eventually, the theorem wormed its way into medical journals, insurance forecasting and business decision-making, before its eventual triumph in the age of the internet, as it became essential for spam filters, translation software and much more besides. In these less dramatic periods, a host of colourful characters and their bitter rivalries carry the tale. McGrayne can capture these mavericks in a single sentence: we are told that Robert Osher Schlaifer, who helped introduced the theorem to business, was "hot as a pistol, sharp as a knife, clear as a bell, quick as a whip and as exhausting as a marathon runner". Despite these colourful descriptions, the book is not always an easy read. Even with a mathematics degree, I struggled to visualise just how Bayes's rule solved many of these problems. And while McGrayne's writing is luminous when describing the drama of the cold war, her attempts to portray earlier periods in a modern context sometimes fall flat. We are told that a theological pamphlet was "a kind ofblog", for example, and
a turbulent history since Thomas Bayes outlined his ideas in the mid-17oos. The sticking point has been the fact that you must first take a stab - sometimes not even a very well-informed one at the relative probabilities of your hypotheses, before plugging "Bayes's theorem became essential for internet in the relevant data to achieve spam filters, translation a more accurate answer. software and much more" Researchers trying to root out any form of subjectivity in their methods found this kind of she feels the need to describe a guesswork outrageous, leading philosophical thought experiment to the theorem being shunned as a type of computer simulation. over the next two centuries. These are minor gripes, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne's however, and to have crafted a The Theory That Would Not Die page-turner out of the history is the first popular science book of statistics is an impressive feat. to document the rocky story If only lectures at university ofBayes's rule. At times, her had been this racy. Then again, tale has everything you would perhaps we should expect nothing expect of a modem-day thriller. less from a theory once described Espionage, nuclear warfare and by one ofGoogle's representatives cold war paranoia all feature as she as" the crack cocaine of statistics ... seductive, addictive and tracks the theory's crucial role in Alan Turing's code-breaking during ultimately destructive".
Red alertness Why Red Doesn't Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the feel of consciousness by J.Kevin O'Regan, Oxford University Press, £40/$59.95
Reviewed by Michael Bond ~~
THIS book is yet another attempt to present and explain the mysteries of consciousness for a broad audience. To his credit, J. Kevin O'Regan takes a provocative and fresh approach to a discipline that often seems to be chasing its tail in search of a way forward. O'Regan is an experimental psychologist best known for his work on vision and perception, in particular for his eo-discovery of change blindness - the way people fail to notice what seem like obvious changes in a scene before them. In the past decade he has pioneered a new theory of seeing to explain this and other phenomena and describe why our visual system appears so effective despite its many imperfections. We see the world, he claims, not by piecing together a picture postcard-like representation in the brain, but by interacting with our surroundings and inferring visual knowledge based on our previous experience. O'Regan begins with an overview of this " sensorimotor" account of vision before applying its principles to the hard problem of consciousness: why sensations feel the way they do. He offers an alternative way of looking at the issue, above all to provide a better method for linking scientific understanding with people's everyday experience. "We should not think of feel as something that happens to us, but rather as a thing that we do," he explains. Or, I should say, tries to. Though I felt intellectually exercised, in spite ofO'Regan's best efforts, I finished the book not much clearer about the nature of consciousness. 2 July 2011 1NewScientist 145
CULTURELAB done and we begin the heavier work ourselves." The choice of men for the expedition had surprising roots in social Darwinism: it was guided by There was a lot more to polar exploration eugenics, a new "science" of racial inheritance inspired by natural than planting a flag, says Michael Bravo selection. Clements Markham, the vituperative president the Royal glaciology, and eugenics. By Geographical Society, patronised An Empire of Ice: Scott Shackleton sounding, dredging, and taking a select group of vigorous, and the heroic age of Antarctic temperature measurements they youthful men to become explorers. science by Edwa rd J. Larson, discovered evidence for primitive Markham believed that social Yale University Press, £18.99/$28 life forms on the sea bed and breeding was paramount. Four t\N l MPIItl JUST over a century uncovered the role of the Southern of the officers on the earlier Ocean's cold waters as a driver of Discovery expedition, for instance, ago, a group of L"'~l K I explorers set out global ocean circulation . were related by blood or marriage. •• Their work to determine the One of them, Charles Royds, was from Britain on a mission that would shifting location of the south "a first cousin once removed of the wife of a cousin whose wife was cost many of them magnetic pole helped scientists their lives. This one of his own second cousins" at the Royal Society understand f IJ\1 \IUH I \ICSO\ changing patterns of magnetic much of Captain close enough for Markham to Scott's Terra Nova expedition is variation, a problem that had conclude that he should be one well known. In this fascinating for many decades eluded them. of the "Antarctic heroes". Larson's intriguing accounts In the bitter Antarctic crucible book, Edward J. Larson places the expedition, which ran from the explorers also experimented begin to reveal the bigger with their own bodies, using 1910 to 1913, in context as the last picture of early scientific "man-hauling" techniques research in Antarctica and its ofthree successive expeditions that aimed to solve some of borrowed from Arctic exploration. place in European geopolitics Antarctica's most important Harnessed to their sledges, pulling of the time. In so doing he loads of hundreds of pounds each, also shows how the continent scientific mysteries. Chapter by chapter, Larson began to play a central role in they purposefully tested their endurance to breaking point. contemporary understanding leads his readers through the Supplementary travel technologies of the Earth sciences. puzzles ofVictorian science were deemed unmanly. After the that defined the goals ofRobert Scott and Ernest Shackleton: expedition's ponies died, Edward Michael Bravo is a historian and senior lecturer at the Scott Polar Research geology, geomagnetism, Wilson reportedly exclaimed: cartography, oceanography, "Thank God the horses are now all Institute, University of Cambridge
Antarctic pioneers
.~
--- -.
_,
r
·~
.. 46( NewScientist I 2July 2011
play in which genes are one actor among the rest. The gene's fall from leadership is the result of geneticists' growing attention to epigenetics - a form of genetic change that is essentially the gene's way of responding to its surroundings but which does not involve alterations in the gene's DNA. So mothers who suffer severe stress during pregnancy have children more sensitive to stress, who pass that sensitivity along to their own children. Readers new to epigenetics will find the book a pretty clear introduction, but its limited scope is likely to leave more advanced readers wanting more detail.
Hysterical history Medical Muses: Hysteria in nineteenth-century Paris by Asti Hustvedt. Bloomsbury, £16.99; W. W. Norton, $26.95
Reviewed by Wendy Zukerman
DOCTORS no longer diagnose _., , people with hysteria. Its symptoms still exist, but now the paralysis and epileptic-like fits that once marked the disease are taken to be signs of modern ailments such as depression or fatigue. So argues Asti Hustvedt Inheriting the past in Medical Muses, an engaging book which follows the lives of Epigenetics: the ultimate mystery three hysteric women treated at af inheritance by Richard C. Francis, the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, Norton, £19.99/$25.95 France, between 1870 and t8go. Reviewed by Bob Holmes With infectious curiosity, IN THE biological Hustvedt writes of medicine's theatre, genes inadequacies at a time when are the directors, psychological problems were not commanding thought to manifest as physical the rest of the symptoms. Though doctors could cell's biomolecules find no physical cause, she makes to their proper the case that the women were places and cueing not faking their symptoms their lines. That has been the a common accusation in the dominant metaphor in biology 19th century. It's an accusation for decades. that, Hustvedt laments, continues In Epigenetics, Richard Francis today with conditions whose argues for a more improvisational cause remains unknown.
Stay connected to a digital world of knowledge -wherever you are.
____
SUPERCHARGE
.,_ YOUR BRAIN
New Scientist is now available as a digital magazine through our on line partner Zinio, meaning it's always at your fingertips on your iPad or tablet computer, wherever you are. Instant delivery
New Scientist delivered to you digitally every week. Always available
Your copy will always be available for you to read. Easy to read
Full colour, full screen reading with easy zoom.
To find out how to get connected with a digital magazine subscription, visit: www.zinio.com/newscientist
NewScientist Jobs
Incorporating Sciencejobs.com To apply on line visit newscientistjobs.com
East Coast Office 225 Wyman Street Waltham. MA 02451 Email NS5ales@NewScientist .com Phone 781 734 8770 Fax 720 356 9217
West Coast Office 201 Mission Street. 26th Floor San Francisco, CA 9410 5 Email NSSales@NewScient ist.com Phone 4159083353 Fax 4155436789
calls may be monitored or recorded for staff training purposes
BIOLOGY Associate/Sr. Associate Scientist -- Molecular/Cell Biology- Oncology AstraZeneca US MS- Mississippi We are seeking a Senior Associate Scientist with expertise in cell and molecular biology.The successful candidate will become an integral member of an oncology bioscience team focused on the discovery and delivery of novel anti-cancer therapies. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401196362
Associate Principal Scientist AstraZeneca US DE - Delaware As part of the newly formed R&D Information department, the Discovery lnformatics capability has a mandate to address the significant data management, integration and analysis challenges at all stages of drug discovery/early development, including target discovery, lead identification & optimisation, compound safety analysis & prediction, biomarker discovery and patient/disease segmentation. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401193977
dedicated to advancing the biomedical sciences by supporting research and other scientific and educational activities. Burroughs Wellcome Fund Awards For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401192809
Pharmacology Faculty 12-Month Position, Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine (LECOM) PA - Pennsylvania The successful applicant will have a strong desire to teach and advise osteopathic medical students and to contribute to the development Biomedicallnformatics Principal Scientist 1- Cell/ Lead Biology- Oncology of the COM through service and Scientist- Real World Evidence AstraZeneca US research. Experience teaching in a AstraZeneca US United States medical school plus a track record DE - Delaware in obtaining research grants is We are seeking asenior PhD level You'll support our Innovative scientist with strong cancer related desirable. Medicines and Global Medicines drug discovery experience. The For more information visit Development teams by advising on individual will become a key member NewScientistjobs.com job ID: the best computational approaches of a team involved in the discovery 1401191798 to deliver real world evidence-based of novel anti cancer therapies. decisions. Not only will you optimize For more information visit all relevant data, information and Physiology Faculty NewScientistjobs.com job ID: knowledge, you could also drive 1401193980 12-Month Position, Lake Erie College of Osteopathic the delivery of processes, tools, and approaches to manage drug project Medicine information and knowledge. Sr. Scientist/Principal Lake Erie College of Osteopathic For more information visit Scientist, In-Vivo/In-Vitro Medicine (LECOM) NewScientistjobs.com job ID: Pharmacology - Infection PA - Pennsylvania 1401193979 AstraZeneca US Preference will be given to United States candidates with 3 years or more The successful candidate will utilize experience teaching in a medical setting. Qualified candidates will Clinicallnformatics his/her pharmacology experience - Associate Principal to support drug discovery be considered for Discipline Director. lnformatics Scientist projects in the Infection area.The The successful applicant should AstraZeneca US candidate will be responsible for possess a strong desire to teach independently designing and DE - Delaware and advise osteopathic medical The goals of optimally designing & implementing studies to determine students and to contribute to the interpreting clinical trials, integrating the pharmacological properties of development of the college through & mining medical knowledge, and novel antibiotic compounds. research and service. For more information visit For more information visit enriching our understanding of the NewScientistjobs.com job ID: healthcare environment offer a NewScientistjobs.com job ID: significant challenge for the clinical 1401193975 1401191799 development of new medicines. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.comjob ID: Career Awards Bioinformatics Scientist 1401193974 Burroughs Wellcome Fund (00401<) NC - North Carolina Monsanto The Burroughs Wellcome Fund is MO - Missouri Discovery lnformaticsan independent private foundation Monsanto is seeking a highly 48 I NewScientist 12 July 2011
motivated individual who is excited about applying computational tools to large scale biological data to characterize the metabolic impact of novel genes in transgenic plants. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401193697
Computational Biologist (BSI MS Level) (004MX) Monsanto MS - Mississippi Monsanto is seeking a highly motivated scientist with excellent training in Computational Biology and Comparative Genomics to join our plant traits team. In your position, you will have the opportunity to apply your knowledge in sequence analysis, plant biology, and data visualization to the discovery of new traits for crop protection. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401195709
Molecular Biologist (00479) Monsanto MO- Missouri Monsanto is seeking a highly motivated, analytical, and creative individual to join the Global Technology organization as a Molecular Biologist. In this role, you will perform the full range of state of the art molecular biology techniques. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401193711
Agronomist 1- Plant job Syngenta US lA -Iowa Responsible for managing assigned process of soybean parent seed and commercial production for the production facility to ensure a high quality, reliable supply of low cost of goods produced.Foster an operational culture founded on HSE and process improvement. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID:
newscientistjobs.com
Director, Division of Extramural Activities, NIAID, NIH, HHS The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is seeking an exceptional and visionary leader for the position of director, Division of Extramural Activities (DEA), NIAID. A $4.9 billion organization, NIAID supports well over 100 major research programs and initiatives within three broad, distinct mission areas: biodefense research ($1 .67 billion per year), AIDS research ($1.57 billion per year). and the NIAID traditional research mission of immunologic and infectious diseases ($1.56 billion per year). DEA serves NIAID and its extramural research community by managing scientific peer review. award. and many post-award activities related to research and development grants and contracts. Annually, NIAID awards approximately 6,000 research grants for $2.7 billion and approximately $1 billion in research and development contracts. In addition, approximately $150 million is allocated annually to small purchases and station support contracts. making NIAID the largest servicing center for contracts at NI H. Global efforts have resulted in $400 million annually in extramural awards to more than 80 countries. Also. NIAID manages clinical research programs totaling more than $500 million annually. DEA provides guidance and review of all NIAID research solicitations and oversees NIAID's research training and international programs. In addition to providing broad policy guidance to Institute leadership, DEA oversees all of NIAID's chartered committees. including the national advisory allergy and infectious diseases council; disseminates information to its extramural community; and develops programs for extramural staff training. DEA is composed of 11 offices. branches. and programs with approximately 210 scientific and administrative federa l staff. as well as over 50 contractors. The DEA director reports to the NIAID director and serves as the principal advisor to the Institute director on extramural policy issues. The DEA director provides overall executive direction and scientific leadership for the DEA. and. more specifically, plans. develops, directs. coordinates. and evaluates DEA's diverse programs; manages resource allocations including staff. physical. and financial resources; maintains staff through recruitment and tra ining efforts; and ensures effective program operations. The incumbent is also responsible for enhancing partnerships and communications with a broad range of public and private research partners and balancing the interests of multiple groups to manage diverse programs. Because of NIAID's clinical research programs. the DEA director must understand clinical trials. product development. and regulatory affairs to establish. review. and operate these programs in concert with NIAID divisions. Applicants must possess an M.D .. Ph.D .. or equivalent degree and must demonstrate the following: 1) worked independently in planning. organizing, and conducting biomedical research in fields consistent with the mission of NIAID; 2) served effectively in research program administration in these fields, which must include managing policies and procedures associated with extramural research administration; 3) acquired an understanding of the history, interests. internal dynamics. and relationships of the Institutes and Centers of the National Institutes of Health and of organizations in wh ich health research is conducted; and 4) worked in a complex electronic environment with an understanding of process mapping and project management. This experience may be gained via senior level research experiences as a principal investigator of a grant or contract or may otherwise be gained through active involvement in initiating research projects. developing protocols, conducting studies, documenting findings. interpreting results in a published report (journal). supervising staff. and managing a budget. Preference will be given to those known and respected within their profession, both nationally and internationally, as distinguished individuals of outstanding scientific competence and those who possess a record as a senior scientific administrator/executive leader.
APPLICATION PROCESS: Applicants must be U.S. citizens. Salary is commensurate with experience. and a ful l package of benefits is available including retirement. health and life insurance. long term care insurance. leave. and savings plan (401 K equivalent). The selected candidate must obtain and maintain a Top Secret security clearance based on an SBI with eligibility for sensitive compartmented information (SCI). Submit a curriculum vitae and bibliography to Ms. Lisa Poindexter-Steed. Office ofWorkforce Effectiveness and Resources. NIAID. 10401 Fernwood Road. Room 2SE57. Bethesda. MD. 20892-2520. and reference announcement number DIRDEA-1 1-01 . The application review process wi ll begin August 1, 2011. Submit direct inquiries to Ms. Poindexter-Steed at
[email protected] or 301 -496-9687. Information regarding the Institute is available on its webs ite at www.niaid.nih.gov. All information provided by applicants wi ll remain confidential and will be reviewed only by authorized officials of NIAID.
2 July 20111 NewScientist 149
newscientistjobs.com
1401193738 Assistant Plant Scientist Pathology job Syngent a US CA - California Independently conducts pathology screens for the evaluation of segregating populationsand experimental hybrids; may manage the general breeder-support screening program. Assist with the diagnosis of plant disease and identification of plant pathogens. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401192470
Director of Strategic Compensation & Human Resources Planning, Santen, Inc. Santen Inc. CA - California The Director of Strategic Compensation and HR Planning is responsible for managingthe global strategic compensation and organizational design and development programs supporting Santen's US operations and the Global Clinical Development and Medical Affairs organizations. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401191765
Manufacturing/Validation Specialist Pfizer US Wl - Wisconsin Performs testing and writes validation reports for various equipment facilities and systems and processes.Generates validation protocols using templates. Primarily responsible for protocol execution of various types of processing equipment facilities and systems and processes under the direction of Validation Engineers. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401196422
Protein Purification and Characterization Pfizer UK MA - Massachusetts Senior protein biochemist 50 I NewScientist 12 July 2011
responsible for hands-on protein purification and characterization for the production and delivery of high quality and high purity recombinant proteins to support therapeuticantibody development and structural biology studies in the Global Biotherapeutics Technologies department For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401193522
environment. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401195476
Senior Research Technologist St. jude Children's Research Hospital TN -Tennessee The Senior Research Technologist in the Pathology Department operates as an advanced-level QO Lab Compliance Specialist research technologist by assisting the principal investigator with Pfizer UK PR- Puerto Rico the data collection and analysis Becomes a Subject Matter Expert for research projects.The overall goal of our lab isto develop novel for assigned drug product/drug substance and understands its insights into the pathogenesis of hematopoieticdisorders, and to process and supply flow (from the manufacturing of the active guide the development of improved pharmaceutical ingredient to the diagnostic tools and therapies. global customer requirements) to For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: develop or revise lab methodology and related documents. 1401195844 For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401193543 Senior Research Technologist St. Jude Children's Research Senior Associate Hospital Scientist I Scientist- Mass TN -Tennessee The Senior Research Technologist spectrometry Pfizer US in the Pathology Department will MA - Massachusetts assist the principal investigator with A position is available for a person the data collection and analysis to conduct MSor GC/MSanalysis for research projects, properly to measure metabolic fluxes and conduct specific projects, maintain efficient laboratory operations, may concentrations of key metabolites in biological samples.The successful assist in training other laboratory candidate will help process and personneLand perform other duties analyze biological samples for either as assigned or directed in order to MS/MS or GC/MSanalysis, support meet the goals and objectives of the novel method development assure department high data quality and support For more information visit downstream data analysis. NewScientistjobs.com job ID: For more information visit 1401195851 NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401193519 Sr. Regulatory Affairs Manager Senior Principal Scientist Vet oquinol TX- Texas Roche NJ - New jersey Regulatory Affairs has the overall Senior Principal Scientist responsibility to develop, facilitate Responsibilities: The Disease and and execute comprehensive FDA Translationallnformatics isseeking regulatory strategies to accelerate a senior biomedical informatics and ensure successful product scientist to join an innovative group registrations in the USA for both to develop cutting-edge scientific new product launches and change systems integrating various management to commercialize genomics/ genetics and text data in veterinary pharmaceutical product the research and early development registrations.
For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401192990
Staff Scientist St. Jude Chi ldren's Research Hospital TN -Tennessee The Staff Scientist focuses on one or more specific scientific endeavors of the laboratory as directed by the Full Member who runs the laboratory. Responsibilities include the supervision of an extensive breeding program and monitoring complex genetic crosses for the laboratory. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401195861
Technical Expert Ill/ IV - Protein Biochemist (Research Triangle Park) job Syngent a US NC - North Carolina Experienced protein biochemist to provide technical expertise in the area of biochemical and functional characterization of transgenic proteins in genetically modified crops in support of global and regional safety and registration activities. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401193728
CHEMISTRY Application Chemist Cardolite Corporation NJ - New jersey The candidate must have: Degree of Chemistry Five years experience in formulating two component paints for industrial or automotive applications Have field experience with epoxy coatings self motivated the ability to work under time constraints Knowledge of coatings chemistry and formulation experience is preferred. Job duties: Formulating, evaluation of paints based on Phenalkamine curing agents Give technical support to sales and marketing Familiar with Microsoft Office Some domestic and international travel is required Exposure to multi cultural customers and colleagues Application methods include spray,
newscientistjobs.com
•
Cluster Hire of Faculty Addressing the Efficient and Sustainable Use of Water for Food Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources And the Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Institute University of Nebraska
The Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska, with support from the Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Institute, is pleased to announce a cluster hire of faculty members to build on existing expertise in water for food at the university. This team of faculty members will define and address compelling issues in the use of water in Nebraska's agriculture, especially those issues related to sustainable agricultural, ecological, and environmental systems that have global implications. Expected outcomes for the team will be: • Closing the yield gap in variable climates by characterizing the interaction of food production systems with local, regional, continental, and global hydrologic cycles to increase the productivity of water used in cropping systems. • Characterizing and defining aquifers and surface water sources to increase understanding of hydrologic systems in differing climate regimes, especially the interactions of aquifers and surf ace water sources, the impact of climate variability on those sources, and the projected long-term viability of water resources. • Development, adaptation, and transfer of water-related knowledge and technology across regions, nations, and the world to promote and ensure the wise use of scarce water resources. • Integration with a cadre of water-related Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Institute scholars from around the world to address water-related issues by informing the revision and development of local, regional, national, and international water policy.
Summary of Positions 1 by Rank and Apportionment Title
Apportionment
Rank
Crop Simulation Modeler (Requisition No. 110293)
Associate/Professor
. 75 Research
. 15 Teaching
Irrigation Engineer (Requisition No. 110295)
Assistant/ Associate Professor
. 60 Research
.40 Teaching
Hydrogeophysicist (Requi sition No. 110294)
Professor
. 60 Research
. 20 Teaching
Ground/Surface Water Modeler ·Geospatial Hydrologist (Requisition No. 110296)
Assistant/ Associate Professor
.60 Research
.40 Teaching
0.10 Extension
. 20 Extension
1
Annual evaluations will be conducted by the administrative Head(s) of the department(s) in which the position resides, in consulta tion with the Executive Director of the Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Institute.
Outstanding candidates are sought f or these positions. To view the complete position details and make nomination/application for a position to the UNL Employment web site: http://employment.unl.edu, search for the requisition number. View the details. Complete the faculty academic administrative information form and attach a letter of application, curriculum vitae, and contact information for three professional references. Interested applicants should specify the position preference in the letter of application.
Review of applications wW begin on Wednesday, June 15, 2011 , and continue the positions are filled or the search is closed. Nominat ions should be sent to: Search Committee Chair, WFI Cluster Hire Faculty, clo Office of the NU Vice Presidenti/ANR Vice Chancellor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, P. 0 . Box 830708, 202 Agricultural Hall, Lincoln, NE 68583-0708, e-mail to
[email protected] The Universi ty of Nebraska has an active National Science Foundation ADVANCE gender equity program, and is committed to a pluralisti c campus communi ty through affirmative action, equal opportunity, work-life balance, and dual careers.
brush, roll, and other wet application methods. Substrates may include various metals, rubber, and glass. For more information visit NewScientistJobs.com Job ID: 1401194409
PLANT MANAGER Cardolite Corporation India, Nj - New jersey Seeking a Plant Manager that will be responsible for assisting in the design, construction, start -up and operation of a manufacturing facility in India. The Plant Manager will also be expected to establish plant policies and procedures. They will aIso be responsible for plant production, financial goals and establishing and maintaining community relations while fostering
a well-trained and motivated staff. PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES Assist in the construction, of a new manufacturing facility in India. Lead the staffing and startup of the plant Direct and coordinate plant operations within company policies and procedures. Participate in the annual business planning and budgeting process. Set short and long termplans to ensure continuous improvement of the efficiency and profitability of the plant For more information visit NewScientistJobs.com Job ID: 1401194410
Analytical Chemist (0047A) Monsanto MS - Mississippi
Monsanto is seeking a highly motivated and creative scientist to join the Global Technology organization as an Analytical Chemist In this role, you will collaborate with multiple teams to drive research for Monsanto's technology development pipeline. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID:
1401193710 Chemist 3 - 6 job Syngenta US NE- Nebraska This includes RIanalytical method development and analysis for all product changeovers in formulation and packaging units at the Plant to check for cross contamination at the
ppm level. Daily, make key decisions and provide direction to Operations Department on approving and solving issues in the formulation of high-value pesticide products. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID:
1401193383 Sr. Agrochemical Formulations Chemist (004MY) Monsanto QC - Quebec Monsanto is seeking an exceptionally talented Sr. Agrochemical Formulations Chemist to become an integral member of the Chemistry Organization. Monsanto's agrochemical productivity products are designed 2 July 2011 1NewScientist 151
newscientistjobs.com
to help make our customers' operations more efficient and play a vital role in improving productivity of our seed and trait systems. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.comjob ID: 1401195704
CLINICAL
1401193753
Clinical Data Architect, Specialist (1 of 2)-0344110608 Johnson & Johnson United States Research and development areas encompass novel targets in neurologic disorders, gastroenterology, oncology, infectious disease, diabetes, hematology, metabolic disorders, immunologic disorders, and reproductive medicine. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401191787
in key winter nursery functions. Responsibilities will include assisting in seed processing functions and distribution for summer and counter season field triaIs in support of the corn abiotic stress project. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401193737
support in developing products outside of the U.S. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com Job ID: 1401191763
ENGINEERING Biomedical Engineer 1- R&D Enrichment-000001TP
johnson &Johnson United St ates Agronomist 11- Research job Research Scientist- Plant Physiologist (0040J) Syngenta US As the market leader and maker of NE- Nebraska blood glucose monitoring systems Monsanto The Research Agronomist 11 IL -Illinois for home and hospital use, LifeScan, assists the Production Research The Yield and Stress Program Inc., aJohnson &Johnson Company, within Biotechnology is seeking Scientist in identification, design, is dedicated to improving the quality of life for people with diabetes preparation, planting, maintenance, an experienced crop physiologist through our OneTouch®Brand of harvest and analysis of production to lead research focused on research studies. The Research characterizing the physiology of blood glucose monitoring systems. Agronomist takes the lead on most transgenic crop plants with yield For more information visit traditional studies which mainly Field Research Associateand stress tolerant traits.The NewScientistjobs.com job ID: include agronomic studies such as Davis, CA (0044P) successful candidate will design and 1401194634 perform experiments to elucidate popu lations, herbicide, etc. Monsanto physiological changes conferred by CA- California For more information visit Monsanto is seeking a highly transgenes. job Description - Application NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401193745 motivated individual to work For more information visit Development Engineer & Product Technology Leader NewScientistjobs.com job ID: within a multi-disciplinary team to develop future transgenic traits in 1401193698 (1104302) Associate Director Scientific corn. Main responsibilities will be to Dow Chemical (US) assist the station manager with the TX- Texas lntelligence-8658110615 Univation Technologies, LLC has preparation, planting, maintenance, Research Technologist johnson &Johnson field observation data collection, NJ- New jersey St. Jude Children's Research an opening for an Application The incumbent will have a keen and harvesting of regulated corn Hospital Development Engineer/Product understanding of the science, field trials. TN - Tennessee Technology Leader. Univation healthcare environment and For more information visit Technologies, LLC is a 50/50 joint Research Technologist Chemical customer to develop insights to Biology and Therapeutics Venture between Dow Chemical NewScientistjobs.com job ID: and ExxonMobil headquartered in drive strategic, innovative use of 1401192404 Department Memphis, TN St. balanced, scientific data and advise Houston, TX. Jude Children's Research Hospital, internal partners on scientific issues located in Memphis, Tennessee, For more information visit that may impact current or future Manager Clinical is a premier center for research NewScientistjobs.com Job ID: the business. Research-1090110613 and treatment of potentially fata I 1401196363 For more information visit johnson & johnson childhood diseases, including cancer and certain blood, genetic, and NewScientistjobs.com job ID: NJ- New jersey Manager, Clinical Research plans, immunodeficiency disorders. 1401194662 Job Description -Innovation manages, and maintains the For more information visit Sourcing Technologist activities of clinical research in (1104470) NewScientistjobs.com Job ID: conformance to all relevant laws, Associate Scientist 1 Job 1401194405 Dow Chemical (US) Syngenta US regulations, guidelines, policies, Ml - Michigan HI- Hawaii The objective of this position is to and procedures. Responsible for in-house development, monitoring, Senior Manager, Regulatory Lead and manage group of 4 provide database management exempt and 20 non-exempt staff o and management of non-regulated Affairs, Santen, Inc. and paralega1-type support to the Develop and evaluate performance and regulated clinical studies. Santen Inc. Externa I Technology group. The role goals of direct reports. Ensure CA- California For more information visit is critical in executing and tracking disciplinary action is properly sponsored research agreements, NewScientistjobs.com job ID: The R&D group consists of completed and followed up when 1401191778 Global Clinical Development and including status, payments, and necessary. Communicate, explain, Medical Affairs, Regulatory Affairs, general characteristics. and ensure announcements and Preclinical and Pharmaceutical For more information visit critical information are relayed to Research Associate job Development and Project NewScientistjobs.com job ID: and from the group, the station, Syngenta US Management. The Research and 1401196371 other groups, and site departments/ lA -Iowa Development group is responsible This position will have primary functions. for developing and obtaining job Description- Production For more information visit responsibilities to manage regulated marketing approval for products Engineer (1104435) summer nurseries and participate in the U.S. and also provides global NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 52 1NewScientist I2July 2011
newscientistjobs.com
]ennifer- Research Scientist for Lilly
Senior and Associate Scientists in Biotechnology Discovery and Development- lndianapolis and San Diego For more than 130 years, Lilly has been dedicated to meeting the health care needs of people in the United States and around the world . We address these needs primarily by developing innovative medicines and investing a higher percentage of our sales in research and developmen t than any other major pharmaceutical company. Due to a strategic commitment to the growth of biotherapeutics within the Lilly portfolio, multi ple opportunities are currently available within Biotechnology Discovery Research, Bioproduct Research and Development, and Drug Disposi tion. These are multidisciplinary orgamzatlons. focused on the discovery and development of novel therapeutic proteins and peptides through the optimization of their molecu lar properties. These programs are synerg1zed by the collaborative efforts of scientists at our lndianapolis and San Diego sites. who take full advantage of our excellence in protein science, molecu lar engineering and op timization, biology and pharmaceu tical development. in the contex t of an integrated operational infrastructure that seamlessly combines the biotherapeutic discovery and development organiza tions. We are looking for several Senior and Associate level Scientists with expertise in molecular and cellular biology, protein chemistry, protein characterization , biophysical chemistry, pro tein formu lation, PK/PD of biologies, biochemical engineering , protein purification process design and scale-up for bio log~es. To be considered for these poSitions, please visit www.lilly.com/careers and search for opport unities in sc1ence.
LILLV IS AN EQUAL QOPQ~TUNITY EMPLOYER.
2 j uly 20111 NewScientist 153
newscientistjobs.com
job Description Technologist, R&D (1104508) Dow Chemical (US) Ml- Michigan The Materials and Parts Processing (MPP) group is a sub-group of Dow Materials Science and Engineering division of Core R&D. The MPP leads process development and process improvement efforts in support of numerousbusiness groups. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401196370 We have career opportunities in a variety of areas. Please see us at www.infi.com.
Dow Chemical (US) GA - Georgia The purpose of this position is to act as a technical resource for Manufacturing personnel at the Roberta, GA site to optimize plant operations, resolve plant problems, and enable production of low cost quality products in support of the plant schedule and business and site strategies. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401196365
job Description - R&D Technologist (1103806) Dow Chemical (US) TX - Texas The Dow Chemical Company has an opening for an R&D Data Technologist in Freeport, TX. The purpose of this role is to analyze data from a number of Dow (both hDow and hROH) and R&D systems to determine the correct resolution of issues. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.comjob ID: 1401196372
job Description - Research Scientist (1104253) Dow Chemical (US) PA - Pennsylvania The primary role is to conduct coatings application research to invent and develop novel rheology modifiers and dispersants for coating applications. The secondary role is to conduct synthesis research 54 1NewScientist 12 July 2011
in support of these applications For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401196366
job Description -Senior Engineer-Engineering and Process Sciences (1104450) Dow Chemical (US) MI- Michigan The Dow Chemical Company has an exciting and challenging opportunity for a Senior Engineer. An engineer position in the Process Science part of Engineering and Process Science is focused on Process Development and scale-up of new products in the developmental pipeline. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401196367
job Description- Senior Engineer-Materials Science and Engineering (1104417) Dow Chemical (US) MI- Michigan The Dow Chemical Company has an exciting and challenging opportunity for a Senior Engineer in our Material Science and Engineering group. We are seeking an Engineer who is capable of leading projects and efforts which utilize the global capabilities of the Modeling & Analysis group to create value for Dow. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401196368
Principal Systems Engineer R&D Enrichment-000001TO Johnson &Johnson United States As the market leader and maker of blood glucose monitoring systems for home and hospital use, LifeScan, Inc., aJohnson & Johnson Company, is dedicated to improving the quality of life for people with diabetes through our OneTouch®Brand of blood glucose monitoring systems. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401194642
Research Associate/ Sr. Research Associate, Antibody Engineering Pfizer UK CA- Ca lifornia The candidate will be primarily responsible for developing and utilizing new methods in antibody engineering projects. Job responsibilities will include using a combination of molecular biology, protein expression, protein purification and analysis to obtain and characterize therapeutically relevant proteins and protein conjugates. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401193520
Scientific Software Developers Tessella WA - Washington Tessella successfully delivers software engineering and consulting services to leading scientific and engineering
organizations across the globe. From supporting safer drug trials to researching cleaner energy - Tessella's staff work to deliver solutions that make a real difference to real lives. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401194583
MATHS&IT Plant Scientist Ill job Syngent a US MS- Mississippi Initiates, directs and executes scientific research and/or development strategies to strengthen pipeline of assigned species. Investigates the feasibility of applying a wide variety of scientific principles and concepts to potential inventions, products and problems in the enhancement of Syngenta's product offering and intellectual property position. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401193747
SENIOR SCIENTIST-0954110609 Johnson & Johnson NJ - New jersey The Senior Scientist SMP will be responsible for a broad range of consumer products such as Skin Care, Beauty Care, Baby Care, Oral Care, and Topical Health Care from a manufacturability and reformulation standpoint. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401191792
OTHER Seed Technician (004NM) Monsanto TX- Texas We currently have an opening for a Seed Technician position. Seed Technicians are involved in all facets of seed production within a location. This may include crop production, harvest, conditioning, maintenance, packaging, or warehousing. These positions wi11 be located at our site in Aiken, TX. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401192413
To boost sunscreen SPF Dow Coming Industry Specialist Miks Starch and his Life Sciences teammates applied a generous dab of silicone inncwalion.
' '
lJOW C:ORNING
FEEDBACK
For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback
~
\'
NEW SCIENTIST has a piece of Mars, but not for much longer. In May we offered readers the chance to win a genuine scrap of the Red Planet: 1.7 grams of meteorite NWA 2975, to be precise. All you had to do was tell us in 140 characters or fewer what you think the first person to set foot on Mars should say. This meteorite doesn't have quite as colourful a story as the pieces of the Dhofar 1180 Lunar meteorite that Michael Farmer collected in Oman, before spending two months in prison there for his troubles, accused of illegal mining (see page 28). It is thought that ours is part of a meteorite that crashed into the desert in Algeria - hence the North-West Africa designation. NWA 2975 has been verified as a p iece of Mars by Colin ... Pillinger and his team at the UK's ~ Open University, who detected 0 3pockets of gas matching the ~ Martian atmosphere inside it
and a signature excess of the isotope oxygen-17 (21 May, p 38). We received 3592 entries for the competition. One frequent theme was expressed in 54 variations on "One small step for woman, one giant leap for humankind". Another six entries had the epoch-making phrase in Chinese. Veronica White from the UK had a female Chinese taikonaut (astronaut) combine the two themes. There were half a dozen variations on "Eat your heart out, Neil Armstrong" and as many grammatical corrections of Armstrong's 1969lunar announcement. We liked many of the more offbeat entries: Noelia Sanchez Gonzalez from Spain, one of our runners-up, suggests "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore." Ken McGowan from Canada, also a runner-up, had "Now, for the first time in history, there is a face on Mars" and runner-up Paul Leese from South Africa offered
The lift in Glynis Langley's hotel in Havana, Cuba, displayed a sign insisting "Children Must Travel With An Accompanist". She would have preferred to hear their voices a capella 561 NewScientist I2July 2011
"That was a helluva simulation Houston. Where's the exit door?" Then there were entries rather looking forward to changing the face of the planet, such as US resident Martin Bancroft's earthy "A small release of methane from a human, a giant step towards terraforming this planet for humankind." After a huge judging effort, we declare Richard Robinson the winner, with "Greetings, Mars residents! I bring you gifts. One thousand million assorted bacteria! Enjoy!" Learning of his victory, Richard responds: "Well, I'm over the moon. Possibly even farther afield than that. Is it possible to be 'over' Mars?" A director of the Brighton Science Festival in the UK (brightonscience.com), Richard already has "a collection of interesting bits of rock, including a lump I picked up on a walk in the Derbyshire Peak District which I thought was fossilised wood, but turned out to be stromatolite: my bacterial forebears." A piece of Mars is on its way to Richard, and New Scientist mugs go to the nine runners-up, not all of whom we've had space to mention here.
ON TO other matters, and another in our series about gestures and their meanings (28 May). Alan Russell says there's one that he hasn't seen or made for years. lt means "Haven't I done well!", or, in the US, "Didn't I do well!". lt consists of loosely closing the right fist, bringing the middle
finger joints to the mouth and breathing on them, then using them to rub your left lapel. Feedback, too, can remember this gesture and we join Alan in asking: "What exactly was it on one's lapel that needed rubbing?"
READERS Tom McCudden and Philip Hanser report seeing road signs in Connecticut saying "No permitted loads allowed" and "Permitted loads NOT allowed". Neither was able to photograph these signs, but Tom sends us a photo of a similar sign that he found on the web. This one says "No permitted trucks allowed" (see bit.ly/permittedsign). "So presumably trucks or loads that are not permitted are allowed," he speculates. He goes on to provide a possible explanation." 'Permitted', in this case," he suggests, "means requiring a special permit because, for example, a hazardous cargo is being carried." Ah. Of course.
MEANWHILE, a lovely photo arrives from Richard Bending showing a road sign declaring firmly "Keep right" in green letters on a light green background and equally firmly pointing to the left. But, our inner pedant objects, that design is in contravention of the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals, adopted into European Union law by Directive 2008/96/EC on road infrastructure safety management. The sign should be white on blue. Richard explains, disappointingly for theorists of quantum or otherwise confused signage, that the sign is at the exit to a campsite, near Saint-Quentin in northern France, used by many left-driving English.
You can send stories to Feedback by email at
[email protected]. Please include your home address. This week's and past Feed backs can be seen on our website.
Last words past and present, plus questions, at last-word.com
THE LAST WORD Hot topic
make no allowance for food waste or losses from disease or other disruptions to the food chain. Farm animals produce much else besides meat, such as wool, leather, milk, cheese and eggs; so even in a vegetarian world, some animals would be retained, but far fewer. The lifespan of most farm animals is quite short, between 10 and 20 years at the
most and often fewer. So without • Few livestock are kept for longer breeding, their population would than two years before slaughter fall quickly. Farm animals produce for meat, and because we farmers carbon dioxide but only as much respond readily to the economics of supply and demand, it wouldn't as was locked up in the grass they ate. They also produce methane, be long before decreasing consumer demand for meat was reflected in another greenhouse gas, but so do rice paddies and submerged smaller numbers offarm animals. vegetation in reservoirs. The questioner's statement that "livestock is more environmentally The main benefits of a vegetarian diet with respect damaging than growing crops" to global warming would be a begs many questions. A grass-fed reduction in emissions from the suck!er operation for beef, for energy used to transport meat " To farm sustainably and from farm to fork: because less land is needed to grow vegetables, minimise heavy machine use, farms will probably more food could be produced locally. However, intensive still need livestock" greenhousing, such as in the Netherlands, can be very energy example, produces less carbon intensive, especially as consumers than a similarly sized arable farm. Livestock can be integrated into insist on having many vegetables vegetable-growing systems in order available on supermarket shelves all year round, even out of season. to reduce the amount of climateThe main environmental damaging tillage and diesel use. benefit from everyone going To farm sustainably and vegetarian would not be reduced m in imise machine tillage, farms global warming but less pressure will probably still need livestock, on world ecosystems - terrestrial albeit in far smaller quantities. and marine - to feed 10 billion ChrisSmaje mouths. Indirectly, global Fro me, Somerset, UK warming might be reduced as less rainforest is felled, less energy • The largest proportion of any devoted to food transport and crop is inedible for humans. All that biomass has to go somewhere, less energy needed for intensive and the easy thing to do is feed farming methods. On the it to animals that process it into "downside", we might all be healthier and less obese, so we'd meat. The sheer volume of lowlive longer and world population grade waste is too great to process would be increased somewhat. for biofuel and the cost for other Hillary Shaw forms of disposal would be massive. Ifit is not removed, the Senior lecturer andfood research consultant, next crop cycle will not be able Harper Adams University College, to be planted. Rotting plants Newport, Shropshire, UK produce greenhouse gasses too.
Questions and answers should be concise. We reseNe the right to edit items for clarity and style. Include a daytime telephone number and email address if you have one. Restrict questions to scientific enquiries about everyday phenomena. The writers of published answers will receive a cheque for £25 (or US$ equivalent). Reed Business Information Ltd reseNes all rights to reuse question and answer material submitted by readers in any medium or format.
New Scientist retains total editorial control over the content of The Last Word. Send questions and answers to The Last Word, New Scientist Lacon House, 84 Theobald's Road, London WClX 8NS, UK, by email to
[email protected] or visit www.last -word.com (please include a postal address in order to receive payment for answers). For a list of all unanswered questions send an SAE to LWQiist at the above address.
One suggestion to combat climate change is that we should become vegetarians, as livestock is more environmentally damaging than growing crops. However, if we stopped eating meat, livestock would still live, so is t he suggestion correct? Or are we expected to cull any remaining pigs and cows?
• World population now stands at almost 7 billion, and is projected to level off at around 10 billion by 2050. The world currently has 17.3 million square kilometres of cultivated land; that area of land could feed 3 billion people eating mainly meat, or 42 billion people eating a strict vegan diet of mainly potatoes. For a more varied vegetarian diet, with vegetables, fruit, eggs and milk, we could feed up to 12 billion people on current world farmland and we could also eat seafood. On the negative side, these figures
"On a diet of vegetables, fruit, eggs and milk, we could feed up to 12 billion on current world farmland"
Other animals will move in, multiply hugely and deal with the biomass. They will also produce the same greenhouse gases as cattle do now. In Australia this will probably fall to rabbits, kangaroos, camels, wild pigs and buffalo. As my university lecturer says: "Given the same area ofland, you can feed a lot more people on bread and pea soup than you can on steak, but you can do it for a lot longer and with fewer problems if everyone gets bread, pea soup ... and some steak." The cattle eat the pea vines and live on the pasture, which is used to rotate the wheat and pea plots. The dung and urine can fertilise the soil and humans get to eat a steak here and there. This is a complex process without an easy solution. So don't feel guilty eating the odd steak. Just ensure it was grown largely on pasture and crop residues and not transported too far.
JanHorton West Launceston, Tasmania, Australia For an in-depth analysis ofwhat would happen if we all stopped eating meat, take a look at "What's the beefwith meat?", New Scientist, 17 July 2010, p 28 - Ed
Whycan't ~ elephants ~ jump? The latest collection: witty, brilliant. intelligent and packed with insight
\\\.
This week's question SPIN CYCLE
Why do track bicycles often have the rear wheel filled in with a solid disc, while the front wheel retains the standard spokes?
BradTyrer Florence, Italy